History Today ...from the Editor

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2010-08-26T05:25:00.000-07:00

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Prof Bartlett on BBC

2010-08-05T02:29:00.000-07:00

Few recent historical studies have been as influential, or as comprehensible as Robert Bartlett’s The Making of Europe (Penguin, 2003). His erudite little vignette, The Hanged Man (Princeton, 2006) is gem too. So it was with eager anticipation that I switched on The Normans, fronted by the Professor of History at St Andrews, which began on BBC2 last night.

I was not disappointed; it was proof that all you need to do to make good history telly is to find a person who knows what he’s on about – Prof Bartlett is certainly that – take him to the locations where the events happened and point a camera at him. It was riveting, especially the passages that concentrated on William the Bastard’s troubled minority and his final vanquishing of rival claimants to the duchy and assorted French predatory French princes. The familiar tale of the Conquest was told with the unparalleled aid of the Bayeux Tapestry. I look forward to Bartlett’s telling of the less familiar stories of the Normans’ relations with the Celts and their adventures in Sicily. But even he may find it hard to explain how the Normans made the name Roger fashionable.

History in pictures

2010-08-03T03:06:00.000-07:00

An interesting new history blog is worthy of attention. Res Obscura, the work of a graduate student based in Austin Texas, is devoted to the visual culture of the 17th century.

On that subject, there’s a fascinating volume just published by Ashgate entitled Printed Images in Early Modern Britain. Edited by Birkbeck’s Prof Michael Hunter (who writes on the Royal Society in the forthcoming October edition of History Today), it complements Hunter’s great labour of love, the online digital library of British Printed Images to 1700 . With contributions from the likes of Margaret Aston, Justin Champion and Matthew Hunter, it represents early modern scholarship of the highest order.

The Albigensian Crusades and finance today

2010-08-02T09:13:00.000-07:00

It’s quite common for journalists to create forced parallels between contemporary concerns and historical events. But one has to admire John Thornhill who, in the Financial Times on Friday, asked what the 13th-century Albigensian Crusades can tell us about the modern dispute that sees deficit spending Keynesians squaring up to advocates of fiscal austerity.

Dispute between Polonsky, Service, Figes and Palmer settled

2010-07-21T03:00:00.000-07:00

The author and Russianist Rachel Polonsky has released this statement:

I am very glad to report that the legal dispute that Robert Service and I have had with Orlando Figes and Stephanie Palmer has now been settled.

This dispute began in mid-April when Orlando Figes denied responsibility for the ten Amazon reviews signed 'Historian' in a circular email to colleagues, and threatened to sue Robert Service for having suggested that he was the author.

I hope it will be clear to everyone (despite some misleading headlines and news reports) that our cause of action was not the pseudonymous Amazon reviews themselves. Our objectives in pressing this case were to recover the considerable costs we had incurred in fending off Professor Figes's legal threats to Robert Service; to gain a contractual undertaking from Professor Figes not to use fraud, subterfuge or unlawful means to attack or damage us or our works in the future; and to require Professor Figes to circulate a formal apology and retraction to all the recipients of his email of 15 April.

I would like to thank most warmly all the friends and colleagues who have offered moral support during these trying months, and to thank our legal representatives, Nigel Tait and Kate Pantling of Carter-Ruck, and Justin Rushbrooke of 5RB, for all their excellent work, decency, and good humour.

Here is Robert Service's personal statement on the affair:

I am pleased that this squalid saga is over. I never wanted to go to law, but the behaviour of Prof. Figes over three months made it impossible to let matters rest. He lied through his teeth for a week and threatened to sue me for libel if I didn’t say black was white. His wife, herself a lawyer, took up his cause and lied that she was the culprit and not he. At the end of the second week he was forced by the incontrovertible evidence to admit that he had written the anonymous reviews posted on the Amazon website. There followed weeks of grinding, needless altercation as he tried to tamp down the wording of his apology and retraction and avoid paying the full legal costs incurred by myself and especially by Dr Rachel Polonsky.

I am grateful to lawyers Nigel Tait, Kate Pantling and Justin Rushbrooke for their help in dealing with this matter. Their expertise and equable discretion are much appreciated. My thanks also go to Dr Polonsky who shared the determination to see off the miscreant and generously shouldered the financial risk of the legal counter-action. Her resilience and decency have my admiration. I relied, above all, on my wife Adele who provided indispensable support in trying circumstances for the entire family.

If there is one thing that should come out of this, it is the importance of giving people freedom to speak the truth without the menace of financial ruin. Thankfully Figes is a rare bad apple in a large and healthy barrel. Nearly all academics hold their disputes in the open. If they get hot under the collar, it is mainly because they feel strongly about the intellectual analysis they uphold.

There is no harm in robust debate. Since my Trotsky biography appeared last year I have had plenty of disagreements with Trotskyists past and present. They object to any shadow falling across the face of Trotsky while I object to their idolatry of him. We haven’t agreed to disagree: we simply don’t agree and have exchanged opinions in full view at meetings, lectures, in print and online. This is normal, even though I think Trotsky’s sympathisers might consider trying to be a bit less grumpy.

Whatever may have been his motives, Figes was not standing up or even crouching down for the sake of a principle. He used his lawyer and his money and lawyers as self-aggrandising weaponry.

Universities in the UK are under all manner of pressures and criticisms at the moment, and it is terrible that Figes has made it easier for the critics to pounce. He has brought shame on that fine institution Birkbeck College. In my view it is inappropriate that a lecturer teaching about the lies in public life in Stalin’s USSR should himself be so menacing and dishonest. I would also question whether such an academic should soon or ever again be trusted to supply confidential, impartial references or reports for research grant-giving bodies.

At the moment I obviously feel sore about the hundreds of hours of wasted time since mid-April, not to mention the unpleasantness that my wife and I have experienced. Despite being asked, Figes has not yet apologised to my wife, only to his own. In some of his statements according to the press he has come close to depicting himself as the victim. Reportedly he put his image in the hands of the public relations agency Financial Dynamics. If this were not so pathetic it would be comical. To do justice to his cavorting would require the pen of a Lewis Carroll or a Nikolai Gogol. Enough already. The game’s up.

Robert Service, 18 July 2010

History in Schools: What is the Future?

2010-07-20T07:15:00.000-07:00

On Monday, the Historical Association sponsored an event at the Institute of Education in London called History in Schools: What is the Future? Chaired cleverly by Professor David Cannadine, it was a public debate on the future of the history curriculum and was well attended, with most of those present being secondary school teachers of history. The panel, which included the educationist Katharine Burn, headteacher Steve Mastin and the former Education Secretary Lord Baker, were articulate and consensual, as were many of the teachers.

But two things unsettled me. Firstly, the fact, as it emerged, that less than 30 per cent of schoolchildren take history at GCSE. Apparently, it is seen as a difficult, academic subject, a stigma it shares with the separate sciences and modern languages (i.e. the very subjects that make one educated).

My second concern was the frequency with which both panel and delegates used the word ‘relevant’. One delegate expressed some anger that children in Newcastle were being taught about the Great Fire of London; apparently it had ‘nothing to do with them’. Presumably, according to the logic of this teacher, people from the North-East of England are only interested in coal mining, football and necking down brown ale. God forbid their range of interests should be widened.

Even more worryingly, one of the panelists, Chris Husbands, Professor of Education at the IOE, expressed surprise that ‘kids in Tottenham’, a benighted inner city area of London, were being taught about life in a medieval monastery. Why? I wonder what the distinguished Princeton Professor William Chester Jordan, a world authority on medieval monasticism who just happens to be black, would make of such pigeonholing?

An Aerra Lida

2010-07-16T07:38:00.000-07:00

An Aerra Lida, a midsummer festival celebrating the discovery of the Staffordshire Hoard, is being held at Lichfield Cathedral and Close next Saturday, July 24th, 10am to 4pm. Expect re-enactments, arts and craft displays and, apparently, music.

I doubt, though, whether the songs will be quite as entertaining as ‘Rameses II is Dead, My Love’, a brilliant piece of anachronism by The Fugs, whose leading light, Tuli Kupferberg, died this week. The Fugs, for our younger readers, were one of the first and most controversial flowerings of the sixties counterculture. For all their more than occasional silliness, they offered the odd sublime moment. They set the poetry of Matthew Arnold and William Blake to music and created at least one extraordinary song that was a profound demonstration of historical contingency.

Imagine these lyrics sung in a Nashville twang:

Rameses the Second is dead, my love
He's left from Memphis for heaven
Ptah has taken him in the Solar Barge
And walked him to Nut's celestial shores

Ramses the Second is dead, my love
He's wandering the plains where the blessed live
Ptah and Ra and Sokaris too
Are taking him on th' Celestial Boat

First Shots in the American War of Independence fired in England

2010-07-13T02:46:00.000-07:00

A fascinating piece in The New York Times by History Today contributor Adrian Tinniswood in which he explores the ‘prequel’ to the American Revolution and the major role played in the English Civil Wars by American colonists.

Meanwhile, in The Guardian, A.N. Wilson comes to the defence of the at once ridiculous and sublime Hugh Trevor-Roper.

The Woruldhord Project

2010-07-07T02:59:00.000-07:00

We claimed at the time of its discovery that the Staffordshire Hoard would prompt a surge in interest in Anglo-Saxon history. The fruit is apparent already. Oxford University’s Woruldhord Project is asking both members of the public and academics to send in any images, documents, audio and video they have that will further the study of the Anglo-Saxons and Old English, for collection on its website. They are seeking images of buildings, artefacts, readings and interviews, anything that might be relevant. The collection site is open until October 14th and can be accessed here:

http://projects.oucs.ox.ac.uk/woruldhord/

We must stop the avalanche of low-quality research

2010-06-23T02:01:00.000-07:00

An article in the excellent Chronicle of Higher Education argues that academics are being forced to churn out an ‘avalanche’ of second rate research in order to advance their careers. Quality rather than quantity is what universities need.

Kynaston's lessons of history for the coalition

2010-06-22T02:21:00.000-07:00

David Kynaston, the distinguished chronicler of Britain’s immediate postwar years, seeks some lessons of history for the coalition as they prepare what are widely reported as the most significant government cuts of recent years [in The Guardian]. The stakes are high, warns Kynaston. ‘There may be real trouble ahead if our rulers get it wrong’. It’s an interesting, if pessimistic piece, but marred by unimaginative remedies, harking back to an imagined post-1945 settlement, which demonstrates that even the finest cartographers of the past often find it difficult to navigate the future. ‘My preference,’ says Kynaston, ‘would be for an ambitious, quota-driven, once and for all opening up of Oxbridge, the media and professions, belatedly completing what the mid-Victorians did to the aristocratic stranglehold.’ Yet Oxbridge (why the obsession?), the media and professions, if they are to be of benefit to the wider society, still need to be peopled by those who have had a first class secondary education. Kynaston appears to have no thoughts on how that can be achieved.

Historic Films and World Cup Preparation

2010-06-21T02:14:00.000-07:00

Algeria, England’s opponents in their World Cup football match on Friday, prepared, so we learn, by watching Gilles Pontecorvo’s masterly film, The Battle of Algiers, a searing account of that country’s fierce war of liberation from France. It seemed to work, the Algerian team being technically superior to and far more motivated than their amply rewarded opponents. So what film should the England team watch as they prepare to save their tournament against mighty Slovenia? Well, I note that The Dambusters has just been released as a Special Edition DVD. Or how about Powell and Pressburger’s moving meditation on Englishness, A Matter of Life and Death?

De Gaulle: a 'great man'

2010-06-18T01:58:00.000-07:00

Today marks the 70th anniversary of Charles de Gaulle’s celebrated broadcast on the BBC to a French nation devastated by the ‘catastrophe’ of the German invasion. Here is Jonathan Fenby’s fascinating article about the event and here is the speech. The speech appealed to the French people to continue their struggle, thrust de Gaulle to the leadership of Free France and set him on the path to greatness. He was to dominate French politics up to his death in 1970. It is unfashionable for historians to talk of ‘great men’, but they do exist and de Gaulle takes his place alongside his admirer and supporter, Winston Churchill, and Kemal Ataturk, the father of modern Turkey, as one of the inspiring figures of 20th-century politics.

Medievalists will be delighted by the news that the third volume of Jonathan Sumption’s highly acclaimed study of the Hundred Years War has been named a winner of the Wolfson Prize. The Hundred Years War III: Divided Houses (Faber and Faber) was awarded the prize, intended for serious historical studies that appeal to the general reader, alongside Dominic Lieven’s magnificent Russia Against Napoleon: The Battle for Europe, 1807 to 1814 (Penguin). 2009 was plainly a vintage year for history.

'Bring it on Willetts'

2010-06-11T02:15:00.000-07:00

History Today contributor Jerry De Groot, professor of History at St Andrews, offers a cautious welcome to David Willetts’ proposed reforms of Britain’s higher education system (Telegraph). Elsewhere, the eminent historian of China, Jonathan Spence, offers an intriguing account of a meeting of brilliant minds.

'Public History' and Dr Johnson's travels in Europe

2010-06-09T02:09:00.000-07:00

An interesting Tuesday afternoon at the German Historical Institute, where a distinguished panel of historians and an engaged and articulate audience discussed ‘Public History’. The German modernist and journalist Franziska Augstein welcomed the retreat from an obsession with Nazi Germany among her compatriots, though not necessarily among Brits. This was understandable, she thought, given the continuing quality of such offering as Antony Beevor’s D-Day. Indeed, admiration for the literary skills of British historians was noted throughout. Justin Champion, scholar of Hobbes and the ideas of the 17th century and an In Our Time regular, expressed concern about Niall Ferguson’s recent offer (‘a bid for a seat in the House of Lords’) to structure a new schools history curriculum. But fellow panelist, Kathleen Burk, biographer of that pioneering master of public history, AJP Taylor, was more relaxed. Britain had contributed a great deal to the world, and it should incorporate these aspects into the study of history; such attempts shouldn’t be lazily judged ‘right wing’. Peter Mandler, in a series of brilliant interjections, warned of politicians becoming too close to historians, cautiously welcoming the reduction in academic bureaucracy promised by the new coalition government. More importantly, he made the fundamental case for the study of history; that it cultivates a skeptical, questioning mentality that is aware of contingency and the possibility of other ways of being. It is otherness that is its great attraction, and public historians should recognise that.

A quick dash into the City, brought me to Dr Johnson’s house, where the Kansas-based scholar Jonathan Clark, passing through London on his way to a conference in Paris, delivered a fascinating paper on the Great Cham’s travels through Europe. Clark looked at Johnson’s encounters with Jacobite supporters as St Edmund’s theological college in Paris, on what is now the Rue St Jacques. It was the resting place of James II and his English supporters, until it was all destroyed following the French Revolution. Clark drew few conclusions about Johnson’s religious sympathies – his is very much a work in progress – but he did demonstrate the capacious and sometimes contradictory nature of Johnson’s religious tendencies. He was an Anglican and a monarchist who recognised the Hanoverians de facto and the Stuarts de jure. But he forged friendships with those of a different theological bent, a fact that Boswell was keen to hide. Clark also made a claim that the Memoirs of the Marshal Duke of Berwick, published in London in 1774 (Johnson, perhaps wisely, turned down the chance to write a preface) number among the great military autobiographies of all time. The Duke, James Fitzjames, was the son of James II by Arabella Churchill, and therefore a nephew of the first Duke of Marlborough and a cousin of King Louis XIV. Educated in France, he served under the Duke of Lorraine at the capture of Buda from the Turks and returned to England to fight on his father’s side during the Glorious Revolution, fighting at the Battle of the Boyne. Naturalised as a French subject following his father’s deposition, he became a Marshal of France in 1706. He defeated the Anglo-Portuguese army at Galanza in 1707, putting an end to Habsburg claims in Spain and returned to France, coming to Vendome’s rescue after the battle of Oudenarde in 1708. He refused to take part in the Jacobite revolt of 1715, on the grounds that he was now a French subject and his king sought peace in Europe. He was killed at Philipsburg in 1743 during the Polish War of Succession. He was in his early seventies and had lived one of the great lives of his age, one that deserves to be better known.

Rude Britannia: a rude, lewd and crude exhibition

2010-06-08T02:40:00.000-07:00

Rude Britannia, a celebration of British comic art, opens at Tate Britain tomorrow, Wednesday June 9th. It’s a rude, lewd and crude exhibition; see Thomas Rowlandson’s etching Cunnyseurs for proof that early 19th-century England was every bit the equal of our own times in the vulgarity department. All the greats are on display: Cruickshank, Hogarth, Gillray. But so too is their modern incarnation, the brilliant but unheralded Simon Thorp, whose contributions to Viz magazine cast a cold eye on the dark underbelly of Britain. Thorp is a remarkable draftsman, who, like many other contributors to Viz, has none of the qualms of the liberal metropolitan elite when it comes to observing the antics of Britain’s marginalised. His finest character, Eight Ace is worthy of Hogarth. ‘Ace’, or to give him his full name, Octavius Tinsworth Federidge Ace, is an unemployed, alcoholic who lives in a garden shed; his wife no longer allows him in the council house she shares with their beloved ‘bairns’. But she does, every episode, entrust him with £1.49, with which to buy medicine for their child, food or other essentials. Sadly, £1.49 is also the price of Eight Ace, eight cans of foul but intoxicating lager to which Ace is addicted and can never pass by. Each episode ends as a Promethean tragedy, Ace doomed to repeat the same torture each day. It is beautifully observed, often composed without words. It may seem odd to compare the crudities of Viz to the genius of Hogarth or Cruikshank, but they are cut from the same cheap cloth, part of a long and brilliant English tradition that uses humour to confront deep social concerns and tells profound truth. Thorp and the other Viz artists acknowledge the debt they owe to the tradition, a perfect example of why What Happened then Matters Now.

Can we create a common history for a 'broken' society?

2010-06-04T05:17:00.000-07:00

A typically eloquent article by Martin Kettle appears in today’s Guardian. In it, Kettle confronts the problem of creating a common history for a multicultural society (some might call it fractured or ‘broken’) such as Britain. He also questions whether we should label as ‘right wing’ historians such as Niall Ferguson, who has called for the teaching of an arch of national history, allying himself with the new education secretary Michael Gove. Kettle quite rightly points out that Ferguson’s sentiments are not much different to those of the late, great Marxist historian Raphael Samuel, perhaps the most incisive commentator on our shared – and not shared – past. One of the most interesting comments made by Samuel during the last Conservative administration, when History Today contributor Lord Baker was education secretary, was that Tories were fundamentally committed to some idea of national history, even though it might be of a very different interpretation to that of left-wingers like Samuel. Most senior Labour politicians were merely indifferent or feared opening up a debate on contested identities. But which path is best? We all have to confront history at some point, especially in times of crisis.

Is journalism the 'enemy of history'?

2010-06-02T08:26:00.000-07:00

Military Historian Antony Beevor made a bold claim when he declared journalism the ‘enemy of history’ while speaking at the Hay-on-Wye literary festival. The trend towards greater freedom of information, the bestselling author of D-Day claims, has accelerated the ‘instant history’, the snap judgement at which good journalists excel, to the detriment of the reflective consideration of the archives that is the preserve of the historian. It may be that the archives themselves are under threat, a concern to which Beevor alludes. New Labour in particular, and modern politics in general, is obsessed with controlling image, a matter which has led to a greater manipulation and control of information: ‘There is a tremendous pressure on people wanting to protect themselves and their reputations for the future; and they are weeding out information before it gets to the archive, or wiping the digital stuff, and I don’t think historians are going to be able to get at material in the same way in the future’. Of course, politicians have always manipulated their legacy – Churchill was a master – but there is also a lack of confidence common to the modern political class that leads many of them to omit the kind of faults that previous generations of politicians would hardly have thought of as faults at all.

On the teaching of history, Beevor has confirmed himself as a traditionalist, supporting Michael Gove and Niall Ferguson in their campaign to bring ‘real history’ back to schools. ‘History is a question of cause and effect, said Beevor. You need to take events in order to make sense of them.’

In today’s Daily Mail, Ferguson was described as a ‘sexpot historian’. Is this a first?

The unintended consequences of the new coalition government

2010-05-25T02:13:00.000-07:00

Cambridge historian John Adamson, author of The Noble Revolt and a member of History Today’s advisory board, considers the possible consequences of Britain’s new coalition government. Unintended consequences, that is [Mail on Sunday].

The growth of liberal sexual attitudes in early modern England

2010-05-21T02:41:00.000-07:00

The limitations of government is a theme running through a fascinating contribution to the latest edition of Past and Present. ‘Lust and Liberty’ by Faramerz Dabhoiwala of Exeter College, Oxford, looks at a ‘momentous development’, one that still resonates, of the growth of liberal sexual attitudes in early modern England. The field is not new. Thirty years ago, Keith Thomas wrote that ‘it was not the punishment of adultery in 1650 but the subsequent growth of sexual laissez-faire which makes England distinctive’. What does appear to be new about Dabhoiwala’s account is her interest in the privatisation of sexuality within a secular, enlightened society and the fact that these ideas were often rooted in dissenting religious traditions. The article is interesting too for its engagement with the remarkable Bernard Mandeville and his splendid and splenetic attacks on the Societies for the Reformation of Manners, his appeal for the legalization of prostitution and his rule, ‘That private vices are public benefits’.
Proof that academic monographs do not have to be as dry as dust.

Shaking Up British Democracy

2010-05-19T08:34:00.000-07:00

Nick Clegg’s promise of the ‘biggest shake up of British democracy for 178 years’ is a big one. Anyone who reads Ben Wilson’s article on the British Constitution of the 18th century in the new edition of History Today – on the newsstands tomorrow – will realise the enormous changes wrought by the Great Reform Act of 1832 and the subsequent reforms that led eventually to universal suffrage. The new government’s plans to scrap ID cards and the National Identity Register suggest an affinity with traditional British notions of liberty that would have been familiar to Burke or Hogarth and which long predates modern democratic ideals. Marrying 18th-century notions of liberty with the mass democracy of the 20th century sounds fine in principle, but will it work in practice at a time when large sections of Britain’s population has become dependent upon the state for its well-being?

Tory-Liberal Parallels with the Fox-North Coalition

2010-05-13T03:07:00.000-07:00

There is a rather strange and embittered article in the Guardian today by Andrew Adonis, the former transport minister. He draws parallels between the new ‘Liberal Conservative’ administration and the Fox-North coalition which held power between April and December 1783.

The Tory Lord North, who famously lost America, formed an administration with the radical Whig Charles James Fox, after defeating the government of Lord Shelburne. It was an unlikely pairing and was bitterly opposed by George III who, among other things, was appalled by the influence of the libertine Fox on his son and heir, George Augustus Frederick. Though Fox and North were the prime movers, the prime minister was actually William Henry Cavendish-Bentinck, Third Duke of Portland. Undermined by its own contradictions and lack of support, it collapsed before the year was out, making way for two decades of political dominance by William Pitt the Younger.

Though there are undoubtedly major hurdles ahead for Britain’s new administration, especially over policy, parallels with the North-Fox coalition do seem rather forced. The likes of Nick Clegg and David Laws, for example, do not seem hugely different in their economic and social outlook to the likes of David Cameron and George Osborne (Clegg is on record as saying that social democracy is dead). None are tainted by failure as yet (unlike North), nor does anyone resemble the colourful loose cannon that was Fox. They are not propping up a lame-duck PM, like the Duke of Portland. And The Queen seems happy enough with the arrangement. So it seems odd that the normally generous Adonis, the arch pragmatist, intelligent student of history and a former active member of the Liberal Democrats’ forerunner, the SDP, should see such similarities.

But there are resonances he has missed. The Duke of Portland was of Dutch extraction and educated at Westminster, like Clegg; and both North and Fox were schooled at Eton College. The grip of such schools on the body politic remains almost as great at the beginning of the 21st century as at the end of the 18th. Until very hard questions are asked about the nation’s education system and acted upon, it will remain so.

What Cameron and Clegg can learn from Macaulay

2010-05-10T03:27:00.000-07:00

According to Edmund Burke, the English way of political reform was ‘to weigh, balance and reconcile’. It was a method that appealed to Macaulay, the great Whig historian, parliamentary orator and a man who was in the thick of the political reforms of the 19th century that paved the way to a fully democratic Britain. As Cameron and Clegg seek common ground, they may do well to listen to Macaulay’s advice: ‘Reform that you may preserve. Now therefore, while everything at home and abroad forebodes ruin to those who persist in a hopeless struggle against the spirit of the age, now, while the crash of the proudest throne of the continent [in the French Revolution of 1830] is still resounding in our ears . . now, while old feelings and old associations retain a power and a charm which may soon pass away . . .’

A Box of Electoral Reform Tricks

2010-05-07T09:07:00.000-07:00

Watching the BBC’s coverage of the General Election, it was interesting to note that the two most eloquent commentators – Vernon Bogdanor and Peter Hennessy – were both historians. It looks like we may be on the verge of major reform of the UK voting system, currently, according to Hennessy, a ‘rigged market in an era of economic deregulation’. It is not so much that a reformed system would introduce fairness, but that it would mirror an increasingly fractured and fractious society. It would certainly not offer a promise of stability as it would be likely to open still further the fissures between the nations.

Bear in mind that the BNP got almost 70,000 more votes than the SNP (who now have six MPs) and that UKIP garnered almost one million votes, over twice that of the SNP and five times that of the Democratic Unionist Party (who now have eight MPs). The Greens, for whom this was supposedly a ‘breakthrough’ election, got their first MP, though they were backed nationally by less than 300,000 voters. If reform goes ahead, there will be many more ‘breakthroughs’ next time, though considerably less of the UK’s much-lauded political stability. Are we about to open a Pandora’s box?

Scandalous historians

2010-04-26T02:54:00.000-07:00

The media has had much fun of late chronicling the amatory adventures of Niall Ferguson and the smooth political advancement of Lord Mandelson’s comrade Tristram Hunt. But the scandal over Orlando Figes’ anonymous critical assaults on his academic rivals is no laughing matter. One wonders how on earth the author of A People’s Tragedy, his remarkable revisionist account of the Russian Revolution and its aftermath, can continue as a professor at one of Britain’s most highly regarded history departments. All that needs to be said on the affair has been said by Robert Service [in The Guardian, Friday].

The Long Constitutional View

2010-04-22T01:47:00.000-07:00

The upsetting of the political apple cart that followed the first of the televised General Election debates of the party leaders (the second is screened live tonight on Sky1), has left political commentators floundering. Though it is possible we may be entering a period of profound political change, it is noticeable how few historians have been called upon to comment on the potential ramifications.

That’s one reason why Ben Wilson’s excellent volume What Price Liberty: How Freedom Was Won and Is Being Lost (Faber) is such an important and timely read. Apart from being a riveting and elegant survey of Britain’s constitutional changes over the centuries, it also reminds us of what the historian brings to the political party; a mindset fixed on the long view rather than the fripperies of the immediate.

‘We learn about liberty by experience,’ he writes, ‘and it gets its value and force from the experience and stories of people living in the past, contending with real issues. I do not mean history here as a static thing which hands us down precious artefacts that we must not sully, or indeed as desiccated morality tales. I mean it as a radical and dynamic force which we can draw upon to formulate and give expression to our own desires and grievances.’

There is certainly plenty of the latter around, but not a lot of consideration of our past political conflicts. One lesson of history is that we should be cautious about the British people’s apparent desire for change. Even Margaret Thatcher, the most radical of modern British premiers, thought them ‘a difficult people to move’.

Ben Wilson will be writing on the 18th-century constitution for the June edition of History Today, by which time the political settlement may be more apparent. Until then, read his book.

The State of the Tory Nation

2010-04-21T02:12:00.000-07:00

Age has neither withered nor mellowed Norman Stone, described as ‘Lady Thatcher’s favourite historian’ in the headline to his piece in yesterday’s Evening Standard. The former Oxford Professor has spent the last 13 years at Bilkent University in the Turkish capital Ankara, writing a brilliantly concise and idiosyncratic history of the First World War and a newly published and very personal history of the Cold War. But he occasionally emerges to comment upon British politics and never fails to entertain.

He argues that the ‘Dianified’ Conservative Party of David Cameron is unworthy of holding office and should ‘let a new Lib-lab coalition take the responsibility’ for cleaning up Britain’s economic and social travails. Prof Stone’s Tory vision is rather at odds with the Notting Hill modernisers: ‘A real Conservative Party would just promise to put an end to the stupid vexations we have to put up with,’ he writes.

‘ Does anyone really want to live in a country where the government has the power to stop people from smoking in private clubs? Or where the perishable rubbish is collected every two weeks (in Istanbul they collect rubbish twice a day, because otherwise the cats scratch open the bags; and since we are on the subject, if an able-bodied young man started begging, he would be honour-killed and quite right, too; the begging slot is reserved for old women who deserve it).’

Hard to see Norm’s policies being much of a basis for negotiations with the Lib Dems should a hung Parliament arise, but a Conservative Party led by the Grand Vizier Boris Johnson may be interested in the lessons of Turkish social policy.

On the subject of the crisis in the Conservative Party as it approaches the General Election on May 6th, I picked up a book titled Is Conservatism Dead?, published in 1997 and co-authored by the Tory MP David ‘two brains’ Willetts (who thinks it isn’t, of course) and the political philosopher, former Thatcherite and all-round pessimist John Gray (who thinks it is). Gray blames the Conservative Party’s embrace of neo-liberalism for the demise of the Western world’s most successful political party:

‘The hegemony of the Conservative Party, exercised in British politics for more than a century and a half, depended on its skill in renewing a particular kind of social order. Generations of Tory statecraft bound the Conservative Party by unnumbered threads to institutions and interests central in the life of the nation. Its dominance in national politics reflected its success in building and protecting networks that linked it with centres of power in the country at large. The hegemony of the Conservative Party stood on its successful construction of a Tory Britain. The effect of nearly 20 years of New Right policies, in conjunction with vast changes in the global economy, has been to blow over that construction.’

Margaret Thatcher was anything but a Conservative, having much more in common with the old Manchester Liberals. We won’t know until May 7th, but how ironic if the modern incarnation of the Liberal Party was to be the greatest beneficiary of her legacy?

Powys and Maiden Castle

2010-04-19T08:06:00.000-07:00

I have just returned from a blissful break in Dorset, the skies blue and free of vapour trails thanks to our unpronounceable, sulphurous friend in Iceland. Though Dorset is at the heart of Alfred’s Wessex and the fictional version of of Thomas Hardy, it is the Wessex of the novelist John Cowper Powys that intrigued me on this occasion. Powys, among the most metaphysical and historical of English 20th-century writers (as well as one of the least read), is the author of a quartet of Wessex novels: Wolf Solent, A Glastonbury Romance, Maiden Castle and Weymouth Sands. I read the first and third and was prompted to visit Maiden Castle.

The name suggests mottes and baileys and crennelation, but what you get are the remains of a massive Iron Age hill fort overlooking the county town of Dorchester, on a site first settled in the third and second millennia. Around 1800 BC a neolithic bank barrow was built on the site and the hill fort was established about 350 BC. From around 100 BC it became a stronghold of the Veneti who remained there until Vespasian’s Second Legion turned up in AD 44. Like Skara Brae, at the opposite end of the United Kingdom, it leaves the visitor in no doubt as to the vintage of these islands, humbled by space and time.

Dietrich Bonhoeffer Biography

2010-04-09T06:59:00.000-07:00

The English translation of Ferdinand Schlingensiepen’s biography of Dietrich Bonhoeffer, arguably the greatest Christian martyr of the 20th century, has just been published by Continuum. It is timely, as today marks the anniversary of his execution – hanged with piano wire – at Flossenbürg concentration camp in 1945 as Göttedämmerung descended on the Nazi state he had opposed with such dignity almost to its end. His statue stands among the modern martyrs on the outside of Westminster Abbey and he is commemorated, brilliantly, in verse by W.H. Auden:

He told us we were free to choose
But, children as we were, we thought —
‘Paternal Love will only use
Force in the last resort

On those too bumptious to repent.’
Accustomed to religious dread,
It never crossed our minds He meant
Exactly what He said.

Perhaps He frowns, perhaps He grieves,
But it seems idle to discuss
If anger or compassion leaves
The bigger bangs to us.

What reverence is rightly paid
To a Divinity so odd
He lets the Adam whom He made
Perform the Acts of God?

It might be jolly if we felt
Awe at this Universal Man
(When kings were local, people knelt);
Some try to, but who can?

The self-observed observing Mind
We meet when we observe at all
Is not alarming or unkind
But utterly banal.

Though instruments at Its command
Make wish and counterwish come true,
It clearly cannot understand
What It can clearly do.

Since the analogies are rot
Our senses based belief upon,
We have no means of learning what
Is really going on,

And must put up with having learned
All proofs or disproofs that we tender
Of His existence are returned
Unopened to the sender.

Now, did He really break the seal
And rise again? We dare not say;
But conscious unbelievers feel
Quite sure of Judgement Day.

Meanwhile, a silence on the cross,
As dead as we shall ever be,
Speaks of some total gain or loss,
And you and I are free

To guess from the insulted face
Just what Appearances He saves
By suffering in a public place
A death reserved for slaves.

Friday's Child, (In memory of Dietrich Bonhoeffer, martyred at Flossenbürg, April 9, 1945)

The Pre-Reform Constitution in Britain

2010-04-08T04:37:00.000-07:00

As the General Election campaigns fires up and the electorate garners unfeasible promises from its aspiring masters, a fascinating article from Diana Spearman published in History Today in 1955 which warns us of the perils of short-termism.

Diana Spearman explains the deep complexities of the pre-Victorian political landscape and electoral system in The Pre-Reform Constitution in Britain

Saxon Gold, Saved for the Nation

2010-03-24T02:26:00.000-07:00

Good news. Three weeks ahead of schedule, the Staffordshire Hoard, the largest collection of Anglo-Saxon gold ever found, has been secured for the nation, or rather the West Midlands. The enthusiasm generated by the discovery has been demonstrated both in financial donations and in the visitor numbers at displays of the Hoard in Birmingham, Stoke-on-Trent and at the British Museum. Those who live in the vicinity of Lichfield, birthplace of another Staffordshire treasure, Samuel Johnson, can see a documentary Saxon Gold: Finding the Hoard, which is being shown in the city’s cathedral this Friday at 7.30pm; all proceeds to the fund. The rest of us can see it on the National Geographic channel on Sunday or on Channel 4 in early April.

Discover Gree

2010-03-23T09:12:00.000-07:00

Yesterday saw the opening of the new £6m Discover Greenwich centre at the magnificent Old Royal Naval College. The centre tells the strangely neglected story of Greenwich, birthplace of Henry VIII, home of Mary and Elizabeth and the site of Wren’s sublime Royal Hospital for Seamen. Architecturally Greenwich is one of the richest locations in Britain with works by Inigo Jones, Nicholas Hawksmoor, John Vanbrugh and James Stuart as well as Wren. To make things even more attractive to the visitor, the Royal Hospital’s Old Brewhouse has been brought back into use by the local Meantime (geddit!!!) brewery. The site once brewed and piped beer directly to the Pensioners’ Dining Room, where each man survived on a daily ration of three pints.

Alistair Hook, Meantime’s master brewer, aims to restore some authentic brews to what was once ‘the centre of the brewing world, the city that created India, Pale Ale, Porter and Stout’. Perhaps he could offer a history lesson to the normally erudite and historically literate Mayor Boris Johnson, who while opening the centre, declared Greenwich the birthplace of ‘England’s most famous son’. Presumably he’s referring to Henry. But is the old monster really deserving of that epithet? It certainly led to a scratching of heads. I have come up with a short list of historical figures for whom the epithet is more fitting:

William Shakespeare, Horatio Nelson, Winston Churchill, Isaac Newton, Charles Darwin, and no doubt there are more.

Cricket: 'England's greatest export'

2010-03-19T06:10:00.000-07:00

The Chap, ‘the journal for the modern gentleman’, carries a report on Matthew Fleming, former England cricketer and Royal Green Jackets officer, who has set up a cricket training camp in Afghanistan. ‘England’s greatest export,’ as The Chap defines the famously complex game, is a fast-growing sport in Afghanistan. The national team, not yet a decade old, has already gained one-day international status, and the local population has embraced cricket with the same enthusiasm as their neighbours in India and Pakistan. One correspondent to The Chap writes, hopefully with tongue in cheek:

‘The late C.L.R. James, not only a fine historian but an equally fine cricket
commentator, always said the history of the British Empire was truly revealed
through the history of cricket. Certainly I’d prefer it if the wily Pathan could
be persuaded to hurl a few googlies at our finest rather than other
objects.’

The idea that cricket offers both an insight into the English psyche and a template for its reproduction among other cultures appears to have gained the attentions of Adolf Hitler. According to John Simpson, the BBC’s World Affairs editor, Hitler was taught the rudiments of the game by British PoWs. In his new book, Unreliable Sources: How the 20th Century was Reported, Simpson writes of an article in the Daily Mirror from 1930 written by Oliver Locker-Lampson, an MP sympathetic to the Nazis. Locker-Lampson quotes British veterans of the First World War who played cricket in captivity near the hospital where the then Corporal Hitler was recovering from wounds and asked them to explain their antics. Though intrigued by the game, Hitler concluded that it was ‘insufficiently violent’. Had he witnessed the Bodyline series between England and Australia which began in 1932, he may have revised his opinions. Such was the ferocity of the bowling of England’s Harold Larwood, it caused a diplomatic row between the mother country and her antipodean dominion.

In Carry on Cricket - The Duke of Dorset's 1789 Tour John Goulstone and Michael Swanton remember how, in the summer of 1789, the English cricket team set out on a visit to Paris. However, the proposed cricket tour never took place.

Jerusalem and myth in English history

2010-03-11T04:40:00.000-08:00

This week I finally got around to seeing Jerusalem, Jez Butterworth’s acclaimed ‘state of the nation’ play now transferred to the West End. All the praise lavished on Mark Rylance for his portrayal of Johnny ‘Rooster’ Byron, the ‘hero’ of the drama is thoroughly deserved. Barely off stage in three hours, Rylance is astonishing. But the play itself, though marked by brilliance, is problematic.

Byron is a former motorbike stuntman who inhabits a dilapidated caravan parked within a Wiltshire wood and opposite a new-build estate full of respectable folk who loathe his proximate presence. At the beginning of the play he is served with an eviction notice by Kennett and Avon council. He hasn’t worked in years, though we later learn that regular donations of his rare ‘gypsy’ blood group earn him £1000 a month from the NHS. He offers copious amounts of booze and drugs and music and fantasy (the currency of modern England) to the local kids, like a deranged Pied Piper. He also attracts the attention of an elderly academic (a fine performance from Alan David) who, distanced by class and status from Byron’s retinue, indulges them and their neo-paganism. The action takes place, significantly, on St George’s day, as the local Flintock village carnival is about to get under way.

One of the children attracted to Byron is 15-year-old Phaedra, who opens the play with a moving account of the Blake poem which gives the play its name. The current carnival queen, she is dressed in homage to Shakespeare’s Titania (Byron being Falstaff?). But she goes missing and it is when her father Troy seeks answers from Byron, that the latter is revealed as something more than a lovable rogue: menacing, predatory, weirdly unsympathetic to a distraught father. Darker secrets are revealed after Troy, symbol of conventional society, takes revenge. A bloodied Byron calls on his odd panoply of pagan gods in a closing, rather silly Gottedammerung.

The play is seen by many as a meditation on English history. In the programme, Paul Kingsnorth, author of Real England: The Battle Against the Bland (Portobello, 2009), contrasts the supposed antipathy to myth among the English. ‘The English have nothing to rival the Mabinogion,’ he writes. ‘They have no WB Yeats or Dylan Thomas, diverting old myths through new channels.’ That is nonsense. The English have Shakespeare, Chaucer, Milton, Tennyson, er, Blake (!) all of whom embrace myth but do so from the position not just of the marginal but also of the mainstream or, as we might say now, the respectable. It is an established literary heritage second to none and open always to the myths of the past. Take for example, the Green Man, whose strange mystery Kingsnorth alleges the English have forgotten. But, as Richard Hayman points out in the April issue of History Today, published next week, England’s churches are full of Green Men; the established church was happy even eager to incorporate them, another example of the marginal and the mainstream merging in a hugely rich and productive historical dialectic, a constant theme of English history: Norman-Saxon, Catholic-Protestant, Cavalier-Roundhead, Whig-Tory, Atlee-Churchill. It’s what inspired TS Eliot to write this passage from ‘Little Gidding’, the last of his Four Quartets, composed during the darks days of the Second World War, source of yet another English myth:

If I think, again, of this place,
And of people, not wholly commendable,
Of not immediate kin or kindness,
But of some peculiar genius,
All touched by a common genius,
United in the strife which divided them;

Such a dialectic lends itself to drama (think of Milton’s Satan in Paradise Lost, and the author’s own swings between the mainstream and the margins). But it’s a rich seam barely touched by Butterworth and, for all its verbal fireworks, it is why Jerusalem is ultimately unsatisfying. It’s embarrassed to confront the central issues. More worryingly, there is also the sense that Byron is such a strong characterisation that Butterworth indulges him too much. More than one punter last night was overheard saying that Byron deserved what he got; a good kicking. That’s not a common response to Falstaff. But to be fair to Butterworth, writing on such a grand theme is remarkably difficult and he deserves great praise for even attempting it. I can only name one contemporary artist who does successfully address the history of England. That is the poet Geoffrey Hill. I shall leave you with an excerpt from his Mercian Hymns (1971):

King of the perennial holly-groves, the riven sandstone: overlord of the M5:
architect of the historic rampart and ditch, the citadel at Tamworth, the summer
hermitage in Holy Cross: guardian of the Welsh Bridge and the Iron Bridge;
contractor to the desirable new estates: saltmaster: money changer: commissioner
for oaths: martyrologist: the friend of Charlemagne.

‘I liked that,’ said Offa, ‘sing it again.’

The English question

2010-03-10T04:13:00.000-08:00

The ubiquitous David Dimbleby claims that his short BBC television series, The Seven Ages of Britain, which attempts to tell 2,000 years of British history though its ‘art and treasure’, is ‘filling in the gaps left by the less impressive treatment of history in the school curriculum’. In doing so, Dimbleby is repeating the recent claims of commentators such as the Independent’s Ian Birrell and the impressive Nige. Yet, the ‘great, and perhaps growing, interest in our history’, as Dimbleby puts it, may also be due to what might be termed the English question. The key events of English history have been marginalized and neglected; probably out of embarrassment: how dare one country contribute so much to the world and have so compelling a past! The result of such characteristically English coyness is that few people can offer even a basic summary of the Civil Wars (and Dimbleby struggled with that one, despite the advice of the esteemed John Morrill) or the Wars of the Roses; the Glorious Revolution or the Great Reform Act. Yet devolution, the growing impact of European political union, globalization and a utilitarian education system are forcing these questions to the surface. I suspect that the forthcoming general election (which Dimbleby will present to the nation) will produce more questions than answers, and ultimately those questions are best answered by historians. Which is why the BBC and other broadcasters should be investing time and money discovering the heirs to David Starkey, by some distance the most impressive public historian of his time. The most important questions of our time are those posed and answered by historians.

Jonathan Freedland, another political commentator, presented an engaging but ultimately unconvincing episode of The Long View on BBC Radio 4, in which he attempted to draw parallels between the repatriation of British soldiers through the Wiltshire town of Wootton Bassett and the efforts of Richard III to bury in consecrated ground his followers who fell at the Battle of Towton, the bloodiest battle of the Wars of the Roses, fought on Palm Sunday 1461. Though the narrative was engaging, the parallels felt forced. The historical background to the repatriation of British soldiers (in large part, a recently invented tradition) is a topic that has been covered recently in History Today and the subject of vigorous correspondence from our readers, all of whom shed more light on the subject than Freedland did.

Serious thinking

2010-02-22T07:45:00.000-08:00

Two articles report on a renewed ‘interest in serious thinking’ and high culture. Adam Cohen in The New York Times is astonished by the range and wisdom on display in the podcasts of Melvyn Bragg’s Radio 4 series In Our Time, while Ian Burrell praises the excellence of BBC4’s output. Burrell suggests this is proof of ‘a hunger for intelligent broadcasting’ as is the success of the podcast of British Museum director Neil MacGregor’s Radio 4 series A History of the World in 100 objects. He might also point to the audience figures for Radio 4 generally and those of the unashamedly highbrow Radio 3, as well as the sell-out audiences for classical music concerts at London’s South Bank and the widespread success of literary festivals. The ever excellent Nigeness takes a dystopian view of this phenomenon, believing it to be an attempt by audiences failed by the current education system to catch up with culture that was once their’s by right. Certainly what is apparent is the phenomenon’s dependency on the BBC licence fee. The small but aspirational audiences of BBC4 and Radios 3 and 4 are subsidized by the 13 million or so who seek out the daily slanging match that is Eastenders, rather as opera goers and modern arts lovers enjoy the (slightly) cheaper seats and infinitely better facilities provided by those who fork out hard-earned cash on a lottery ticket.

The Real Site of the Battle of Bosworth Field

2010-02-19T03:17:00.000-08:00

The real site of the Battle of Bosworth Field, the concluding action of the Wars of the Roses, has been revealed following the announcement of its discovery last October. The traditional site on Ambion Hill near the village of Sutton Cheney in Leicestershire has been usurped, just as Richard III was by Henry Tudor on the afternoon of August 22nd, 1485. The real site, according to Glenn Foard of the Battlefields Trust, is about a mile south-west, in a dull, flat field on Alf Oliver’s Fenn Lane Farm. That is where a strikingly beautiful silver boar, similar to the one beloved by visitors to the British Museum’s medieval galleries, was found. It almost certainly belonged to a trusted knight of Richard’s retinue who fought and died alongside his king. The boar was Richard’s personal symbol, still worn by members of the fiercely loyal Richard III Society.

Two things come to mind. First, that hoary but valuable old question posed to generations of undergraduates: did the Middle Ages come to an end on Bosworth Field? Secondly, who will answer such questions, who will teach the Wars of the Roses to future generations, who will revise past certainties if our universities and our schools continue to neglect Medieval history? Everyone should know what happened on Bosworth Field and the consequences of the events that took place that day. Today’s revelations will hopefully encourage many more to find out.

In 1985 Colin Richmond claimed in The Battle of Bosworth that 'Richard's valiant death is almost the only feature of the battle of Bosworth we can be sure of'.

A Silver Lining Amongst the Gloom

2010-02-18T02:42:00.000-08:00

Gloom has descended upon university history departments throughout Britain. Cambridge’s history faculty has followed that of Oxford in freezing all new appointments, perhaps for years to come. One senior historian has described the position outside Oxbridge as ‘near catastrophic’. Much publicity has been given to the University of Sussex’s decision to drop research and research-led teaching in early modern history in what appears to be yet another step towards the dominance of modern history at the expense of earlier periods. King’s College London is to lose its chair in palaeography, an obscure discipline certainly, but one crucial to the production of scholarly editions of, for example, Anglo- Saxon literature. Mark Goldie, reader in British intellectual history at Cambridge, is surely right when he says that a ‘decent history syllabus cannot be so present-centred’.

Yet there may be some benefits to all of this in the long run, a concentration of minds. Clearly, given current economic conditions and the loss of £950 million from higher education budgets over the next three years, historians and their departments, like other academics, will be compelled to go in search of private endowments, as has been common in the United States for decades (with remarkable success) and to forge closer links with the public (something too many historians are still reluctant to do).

Commentators such as Simon Jenkins have even suggested that some universities should seize the opportunity to privatise and charge the market rate for their courses, enabling them to provide scholarships to those unable to afford the full fees. But would government be willing to cede control of educational institutions?

The options for university departments will become more apparent when Lord Browne of Madingley’s report on the funding of higher education is published later this year. Whatever the conclusions reached, it will be wise to recall the words of the Oxford historian and President of the Board of Education H.A.L. Fisher, written in 1919, but still relevant to the teaching of history, not least because they are so utterly at odds with the current mania for ‘relevance’ and ‘utility’:

‘The business of a university is not to equip students for professional posts, but to train them in disinterested intellectual habits, to give them a vision of what real learning is, to refine taste, to form judgement, to enlarge curiosity and to substitute for a low and material outlook on life a lofty view of its resources and demands.’

British historians in the US

2010-02-16T02:19:00.000-08:00

A number of columnists [Simon Heffer in the Saturday Telegraph; William Rees-Mogg in yesterday’s Times] express bafflement at Sussex University’s decision to axe the teaching of British history pre-1700 and European history pre-1900. Only last month I was in conversation with Mark Kishlansky, Professor of History at Harvard University and an authority on early-modern Britain. We were discussing his former teacher David Underdown [Guardian obituary], one of the first British historians to pursue a distinguished career across the Atlantic. There are now many more of them, not least in Kishlansky’s own, world-class institution. ‘Your universities are just so damned good at creating top-class historians,’ Kishlansky said. ‘That’s why we like taking them.’ But for how much longer?

Where are the Political Roots?

2010-02-12T01:38:00.000-08:00

Mark Mazower, the British-born professor of history at Columbia University in New York, writes an interesting review of Richard Evans’s recent book Cosmopolitan Islanders: British Historians and the European Continent (Cambridge University Press). In the New Republic piece, Mazower makes the point that many British historians have been moved to study other countries’ past because they ‘find the stability of modern political life in Britain less noteworthy than the radical instability of the world of fascism and totalitarianism. Why bother with Oswald Mosley—a study in failure—when the Nazis give you the real thing?’

That may not be the case for much longer. The forthcoming general election may herald a period of instability in British politics, the consequences of which may be troubling. In part, the current uncertainty surrounding British politics and public dissatisfaction with the major political parties stems – as the historian Jeremy Black claimed last night at the launch of his 98th (98th!!!) book The Politics of World War Two (SAU) – from their abandonment of a historical context, the desperate desire to seem modern and not to call upon their ideological roots. For this and other reasons, Mazower claims that Evans’ study will be read as ‘a paean to a time when history’s public role could be taken for granted. This is no longer true, at least in Britain. And perhaps this is another, sadder, reason why so many British historians find their warmest reception abroad, not least in the United States, where history still seems to matter’.

At a time of economic, social and political crises, look to the past

2010-02-10T05:01:00.000-08:00

The erudite and very idiosyncratic theological blog Cranmer picks up on the uncharacteristic rudeness displayed by Stephen Fry towards Anne Widdecombe in the latter’s examination of Mosaic law broadcast on Channel 4 on Sunday. A more civilized debate took place on BBC Radio 3’s Night Waves last night when the Conservative MP David ‘two brains’ Willetts discussed his new book Pinch: How the Baby Boomers Took their Children’s Future – and Why They should Give it Back (Atlantic) with, among others, the feminist author Bea Campbell. Willetts’ contention (in a very simplified form) is that the ‘baby boomers’, those westerners born between the years 1945 and 1965, have prospered, as no other generation in history has, at the expense of their children, and that the political and cultural permissiveness of the 1968 generation found economic expression among the same generation in the Thatcherite reforms of the 1980s . The idea that there is considerable political continuity between the generation of 1968 and 1979 is one that is explored by Francis Beckett in a forthcoming edition of History Today.

The theme was negotiated tentatively in Night Waves to no real conclusion and even less agreement. Willetts was vague about future political strategies that might make life a little easier for future generations (probably because he wants you to buy his book and, let’s be honest, because he was implicated in the economic excesses which were fostered from the 1980s). Campbell dismissed Willetts' arguments, stating bluntly that Britain should become like Denmark, a highly taxed, highly regulated society. Now, this obsession with Scandinavia is something of an idée fixe at the moment in British political circles. It began on the left – rare is the week when The Guardian doesn’t carry at least one article admiring of Scandinavian ways, whether its Finland’s superlative musical education system, Denmark’s adoption of green transport systems, or eulogizing the Nordic diet (Herrings, loganberries, rye bread!). Now the Conservative shadow education minister Michael Gove has gone all Nordic with his scheme to introduce Swedish style independent schooling. All very well, and there is no doubt much to admire about the societies of our northern neighbours. But, as Charles Moore warns in yesterday’s Telegraph, how much can Britain – a hugely diverse, densely populated, highly mobile and cantankerous country – adopt of even the attractive bits of small, sparsely populated, culturally homogenous and consensual countries such as those of Scandinavia. The whole obsession is reminiscent of an episode recounted in Norman Stone’s forthcoming volume, The Atlantic and its Enemies: A Personal History of the Cold War (Penguin), in which according to Stone, Prime Minister Edward Heath pushed for British membership of the European Common Market (as it then was) for little more reason than western Europe seemed to be a nicer, better run place than contemporary Britain. It may be that solutions to Britain’s current economic, political and social crises – acknowledged by a majority of the population according to a recent poll in The Times – may also be found in another country pundits are a little less eager to admire, Britain’s past. It’s worth a look.

The Bible: A History and British Intolerance

2010-02-08T04:13:00.000-08:00

Channel 4’s television series The Bible: A History is a brave if not entirely successful project to examine the good book’s contemporary relevance. This week, Anne Widdecombe, Tory harridan and Catholic convert, made the case for the Mosaic laws as the best framework for a decent society, hardly a controversial assertion. But Widdecombe’s arguments raised the hackles of a number of atheist guests including, surprise, surprise, Christopher Hitchens whose ill-tempered turns are rather tiring. More surprising was Stephen Fry’s response: the normally affable and erudite polymath proceeded to shout down the entirely reasonable if argumentative Widdecombe who looked rather stunned by the whole episode. Recent reports suggest that Britain has become a more tolerable country over the last decade or so. But I suspect we are neither more nor less tolerant than before. It is the targets of our intolerance that have changed.

The Odd Couple

2010-02-08T03:35:00.000-08:00

News in yesterday's Daily Mail that historian Niall Ferguson has brought his marriage to a conclusive and high-profile end:

The Harvard professor has left his wife for Ayaan Hirsi Ali, a glamorous Somali lawyer threatened with death for scripting a film critical of Islam.

Our favourite quote was definitely the one from Belinda Luscombe, the editor of the Mail on Sunday Magazine's arts editor:

In all the years I have known Ayaan, she's never had a boyfriend. She's gorgeous, but with a fatwa, it's tricky to find guys.

Read the article in full on the Daily Mail website.

A Swiss Family Historian

2010-02-05T07:45:00.000-08:00

Today is the birthday, in 1505, of Aegidius Tschudi, the first historian (of a fashion) of the Swiss Confederation, an entity still mysterious to many. His most celebrated work, De prisca ac vera Alpina Rhaetia, published in 1528, is a history of the Raetia, the name of the Roman province and its people that now makes up much of eastern and central Switzerland. The Helvetii, the Alpine tribe who give their name to modern day Switzerland – Helvetia – were their western neighbours. Until the 19th century, Tschudi’s writings were highly regarded but were found to be misleading, a means of advancing his own family’s claims to a supposedly noble past. So, all in all, not the greatest or most trustworthy of historians, but Swiss practitioners of the craft are not numerous so I thought I would bring him to your attention. You probably won’t find his work in your local Waterstones.

David Birmingham looks at how the invented traditions of 19th-century Swiss history cemented a sense of national identity, in The 1848 Unification of Switzerland

The Unholy Crusades?

2010-02-04T02:08:00.000-08:00

The Daily Mail is a newspaper held in contempt by metropolitan bien-pensants, often for good reason. But it carries as much serious history within its bizarre mixture of celeb-baiting, hypochondria and ‘proper’ news as any other British newspaper. Our own Juliet Gardiner’s excellent new book The Thirties (Harper Press) is currently being serialised in the Mail. Peter Oborne is one of the most historically-informed of political commentators. And historians of the calibre of Max Hastings and Michael Burleigh are regular contributors.

But today’s edition contains a piece of A-grade historical tosh: William Napier, author of the Attila novels, says that ‘traditionally the Crusades have been painted as a noble mission’. By who exactly? Since when? Edward Gibbon, writing as far back as the 18th century, judged them to have been born of a ‘savage fanaticism’ and that they had ‘checked rather than forwarded the maturity of Europe’. Despite the efforts of Walter Scott and various 19th-century colonialists that’s pretty much the view today. For a serious consideration of the subject, may I point readers to Jonathan Phillips article Call of the Crusades published in our November 2009 issue. Bizarrely, Phillips is namechecked by Napier, though one wouldn’t think he had read his excellent book Holy Warriors: A Modern History of the Crusades (Bodley Head) very carefully.

The Mail carries a more considered article by the historian of decline Correlli Barnett on the need to cut Britain’s military cloth, but the argument is put more forcefully and originally by the Times’ Sam Kiley whose latest, superb book Desperate Glory: At War in Helmand with Britain’s 16 Air Assault Brigade is one of the best books I have ever read on the subject of men and war. According to Kiley:

subtle, fast and highly trained small, integrated units are the only way to fight the new form of war that is already upon us. There is now a very good case for copying the US Marine Corps and integrating the Army, Navy and Air Force into one’. Britain’s armed forces should become the ‘fast, lean, and cheap attack dogs of Nato. If we get the Strategic Defence Review right, we would have a big voice in Nato because we could deliver a powerful and quick punch on its behalf — and because we can box with brains. We can leave the big expensive stuff to the Americans.

Jonathan Phillips traces the 800-year history of ‘Crusade’ and its power as a concept, in The Call of the Crusades

Gillian Reynolds in the Telegraph

2010-02-03T08:51:00.000-08:00

The Telegraph’s superb radio critic Gillian Reynolds echoes some of the concerns about Neil MacGregor’s current Radio 4 series that I express in the February issue of History Today. The radio series that’s really – and should be – a television series. What’s that saying about great minds?

A History of the World in 100 Objects (Radio 4, Mondays to Fridays) hits its third week (of an initial six, with more to come). There’s something wrong with this series, too. It’s overly busy, almost as much as Chris Evans’s breakfast show. Chris, however, has two and a half hours to fill daily. Neil MacGregor gets under 15 minutes to talk about each representative object – a tool, a carving, a pestle, a bowl – and fit it into his wider story of global evolution.

Yet, for instance, if food is the day’s focus we must hear Madhur Jaffrey and Bob Geldof on the subject too, not to mention fitting everything into an aural frame of music, title, opening montage, scripted description and bits of distracting location sound. It’s too much. MacGregor is a born communicator, a brilliant talker. Why not just allow him to do it? Here is radio made for television audiences. Listeners may occasionally like to talk back. When the story is this good we actually prefer to concentrate.

All in One

2010-01-22T02:01:00.000-08:00

An interesting take in the Guardian from Simon Jenkins, on the re-emergence of Princess Eadgyth, Neil MacGregor’s new series on BBC Radio 4, David Dimbleby’s television trawl through the history of British art and the Catholic veneration of relics. Yes, that’s just one article.

MacIntyre on Haiti

2010-01-21T06:33:00.000-08:00

Following on from yesterday’s post, the excellent Ben Macintyre of The Times examines the poisonous historical legacy handed to Haiti by its former colonial master, France. It's a 200-year-long horror show that does much to explain the current plight of Haiti’s unfortunate citizens.

Ian Bell describes here how in 1844 the people of the former Spanish colony rose in rebellion against the Haitians, in Santo Domingo's Struggle for Independence

The Misery of Haitian History

2010-01-20T03:13:00.000-08:00

One week on from the Haitian earthquake and, despite the efforts of broadcasters to find miraculous cases of survival, the overall picture is grim. It is hard to think of a more hopeless situation and the consequences for this benighted island will last for generations. Haiti was a nation born of ‘the only successful slave revolt in history’, the Haitian Revolution of 1791-1804 led by Pierre Toussaint L’Ouverture, a former slave who became a general in the French revolutionary army, Jacques Dessalines and Alexandre Pétion.

This remarkable episode is the subject of The Black Jacobins by CLR James, the Trinidadian Marxist historian christened the ‘Black Plato’ who also wrote the finest book ever written on cricket, Beyond the Boundary (arguably the finest book written on any sport). First published in 1938 and currently available in a Penguin edition edited and introduced by James Walvin, The Black Jacobins is still the starting point for anyone who wishes to grapple with Haiti’s history. James, a man of the left who, unusually, insisted that the liberation of the oppressed came only when they had absorbed and mastered the finest culture of the dominant class, was a noted stylist, as this excerpt demonstrates:

‘The stranger in San Domingo [later Haiti] was awakened by the cracks of the whip, the stifled cries, and the heavy groans of the Negroes who saw the sun rise only to curse it for its renewal of their labours and their pains. Their work began at day-break: at eight they stopped for a short breakfast and worked again till midday. 'They began again at two o’clock and worked until evening, sometimes until ten or eleven. A Swiss traveller has left a famous description of a gang of slaves at work. “They were about a hundred men and women of different ages, all occupied in digging ditches in a cane-field, the majority of them naked or covered with rags. The sun shone down with full force on their heads. Sweat rolled from all parts of their bodies. Their limbs, weighed down by the heat, fatigued with the weight of their picks and by the resistance of the clayey soil baked hard enough to break their implements, strained themselves to overcome every obstacle. A mournful silence reigned. Exhaustion was stamped on every face, but the hour of rest had not yet come. The pitiless eye of the Manager patrolled the gang and several foremen armed with long whips moved periodically between them, giving stinging blows to all who, worn out by fatigue, were compelled to take a rest - men or women young or old”. This was no isolated picture. The sugar plantations demanded an exacting and ceaseless labour. The tropical earth is baked hard by the sun. Round every 'carry' of land intended for cane it was necessary to dig a large ditch to ensure circulation of air. Young canes required attention for the first three or four months and grew to maturity in 14 or 18 months. Cane could be planted and would grow at any time of the year, and the reaping of one crop was the signal for the immediate digging of ditches and the planting of another. Once cut they had to be rushed to the mill lest the juice became acid by fermentation. The extraction of the juice and manufacture of the raw sugar went on for three weeks a month, 16 or 18 hours a day, for seven or eight months in the year.’

The misery continues.

Read History Today articles on Jean-Jacques Dessalines, Haiti and Hispaniola on our Caribbean History Page

A Little History of the World

2010-01-18T09:41:00.000-08:00

Foyles, the once bonkers but now mildly eccentric and well stocked book-selling institution on London’s Charing Cross Road, has announced a pleasant surprise for history lovers. Its best-selling book of 2009 was E.H. Gombrich’s A Little History of the World (Yale University Press).

Gombrich was a son of that most civilized of milieus, interwar Viennese Jewry – his mother was a pupil of the great composer Anton Bruckner. Many Viennese Jews who got out in time to escape the gas chambers found exile in Britain, much to the cultural benefit of their hosts. Gombrich, who had a lifelong association with the University of London’s Warburg Institute, ended up a knight of the realm and is most famous for authoring The Story of Art (millions of copies which have been sold).

He wrote Eine kurze Weltgeshicte für junge Leser as a hurried commission in 1935. It eventually appeared in English in the author’s own translation in 2005. It is the best world history ever written for intelligent children and it will do its adult readers no harm either. That it is Foyle best-selling book of the year is proof that while we are indeed all living in the gutter, some of us – and more than we might think – are looking at the stars.

Haiti's troubled past

2010-01-14T09:43:00.000-08:00

The tragic events in Haiti – for once, the epithet ‘Biblical’ seems apt – are just one more grim chapter in the Caribbean island’s terrible history. Tim Edwards offers a commendably concise account of Haiti’s troubled past here. http://www.thefirstpost.co.uk/58405,news-comment,news-politics,why-is-haiti-so-poor-a-history-of-earthquake-hit-island-papa-doc-duvalier

If you hear anyone whingeing about the recent spate of bad weather in Britain . . .

Starkey on Today

2010-01-13T03:35:00.000-08:00

David Starkey is becoming something of a regular on BBC Radio 4’s Today programme. On the edition edited by the thriller writer and all round good egg P.D. James he talked eloquently (and courteously, tamed by the grand dame) on English national identity, musing on whether the English now inhabited a ‘post-nation’. Today he mused on the Staffordshire Hoard and the continuing camoaign to raise funds for a permanent home for the collection in the West Midlands. He thought it important that it should remain in the old kingdom of Mercia, as it was a symbol of the origins of ‘Angle-land’, and threw light on issues of Englishness that needed to be considered and embraced. The English, after all, have as much right as anyone else to muse on the nature of their identity, reluctant though they seem to be to celebrate it too loudly. The significance of the Hoard is hard to overestimate.

Listen to the Starkey segment of the programme by clicking here.

The Courage of Tony Judt

2010-01-11T06:22:00.000-08:00

There was a very moving interview conducted by Ed Pilkington with the contemporary historian Tony Judt published in Saturday’s Guardian. Judt, London-born, US based, is enduring the hell of a rapidly worsening motor neurone disease, ‘one of the worst diseases on earth’, as he puts it. Judt has specialized in chronicling the lives of that rare band of fearless progressives who held out against the tyranny of Soviet totalitarianism: his excellent book, The Burden of Responsibility (Chicago University Press, 1998) is both a study and a celebration of three Frenchmen – Raymond Aron, Albert Camus and Leon Blum – committed to the ideals of democracy as so many of their compatriots dealt with the devil. In the interview, Judt revealed himself to be a man of similar courage.

Book on the Staffordshire Hoard

2009-12-11T07:46:00.000-08:00

Just in time for Christmas, the British Museum’s book on the Staffordshire Hoard is now available, priced at £4, of which £1 goes to the acquisition fund. As we have already noted, it’s a pretty impressive production given the timescale, beautifully illustrated and authortitative. It’s available from Stafford Library, Shire Hall Gallery, Stafford, Lichfield Library, Tamworth Library, Stafford and Lichfield Record Offices, Tamworth Castle and Tamworth Information Centre. For those outside The West Midlands (or, indeed, those within) it can be ordered from the British Museum via the excellent Staffordshire Hoard website here http://www.staffordshirehoard.org.uk/

TV History in the Cultural Ghetto

2009-12-11T03:43:00.000-08:00

Tristram Hunt was today dragged into the dispute over Andrew Marr’s BBC TV series The Making of Modern Britain, discussing the issue of history on television with Marr’s vociferous critic Charles Moore on Radio 4’s Today programme.

The package began with three excerpts: from Kenneth Clark’s 1969 TV series Civilisation (all clipped tones and cultural certainties); Laurence Olivier, raising the art of narration to its zenith in Thames TV’s The World at War; then Andrew Marr talking about posh, possibly very cruel, people in hats.

Moore gave the impression of a man who simply doesn’t like television, regarding it as an intrusion (sometimes I know how he feels) into his Trollopian, High Tory world. Tristram Hunt is a fan of TV: since the debacle of his series on the Civil War (which Moore, then the Daily Telegraph’s editor, urged the BBC to pull halfway through its run), Hunt has proved himself to be an inspired public historian (if you want proof, read his excellent column in this week’s Guardian).

But I have to disagree with him on one thing. He talked of his recent experience watching Andrew Marr’s series with a class of 14-year-olds in Walthamstow, north-east London. Despite its silly stunts and simplicities, they find it boring. I suspect that some children find everything boring. From this single experience, Hunt concluded that to grab the attention of ‘inner city’ youngsters one would be inclined to make ever more whizz-bang TV, with fast edits, crude simplicities and trite modern-day parallels. At least that is what Hunt’s logic dictates.

But I simply don’t believe that to be the case. Inner city youngsters are just as capable of understanding proper history as anyone else, but it is quite unlikely that they have ever been exposed to it, certainly not on television in the way that an ‘inner city’ youngster of my generation was.

As I remember (and I watched every episode when it was originally shown, with great anticipation) The World at War was shown prime time on ITV. It was superbly written by proper historians, brilliantly narrated (by Olivier) and edited, by Jeremy Isaacs. Civilisation, similarly, and such programmes – and there were many others – appeared on BBC1, mingled with light entertainment, sport and news.

That is no longer the case. Diarmaid MacCulloch’s History of Christianity is tucked away on the cultural ghetto of BBC4 (and will probably eventually appear, late night, on BBC2). A bright, curious working-class teenager is unlikely to come across it by happenstance after an episode of Eastenders (though it is considerably more uplifting).

OK, one might say, what kind of teenager will be interested in MacCulloch’s programme other than those families who have BBC4 and Radio 4 as default channels. Fair enough. But the BBC has just thrown away a remarkable opportunity to attract a great number of youngsters to engage in serious history.

Its series, A History of the World in 100 Objects launches early next year. It’s a brilliant premise: each programme takes as its subject an object from the BM’s vast collection – a flint hammer from stone age Africa; an Aztec serpent; the statue of an Indian god or the Roman Emperor Hadrian; a relic from the Industrial Revolution – and its fascinating story is told.

What a visual treat, what wonderful stories, perfect for all the family, they will follow or precede Eastenders on a daily basis. Or rather they won’t. The stories of these visually remarkable objects will be told on – Radio 4. These stories, it seems, are too good for the proles who also pay the licence fee. Which suggests that the BBC no longer speaks or even seeks to speak to one nation, but two. There is BBC4, Radio 4 and (the utterly superb) Radio 3 for the educated and aspirational. And there is BBC1 and, increasingly, BBC2 for the rest. Or shall we call it ‘BBC2, D’. It is a shocking betrayal of the BBC’s historical role to inform, educate and entertain, and they will pay a heavy price in the long run.

From A.J.P. Taylor’s mesmerising lectures in front of a black backdrop to technicolour Civilisation and the ground-breaking World At War, Taylor Downing looks at the early days of history on television in Screen Saviours: History in Television

Ben Macintyre on the Rosetta Stone

2009-12-10T05:06:00.000-08:00

Ben Macintyre comments today in the Times on the saga of the Rosetta Stone's disputed ownership:

Instead of debating ownership and trying to impose modern notions of political sovereignty on ancient cultural patrimony, the argument should be about how to bring the world’s cultural riches to the widest possible audience, regardless of where they physically reside.

Happy to observe we are in agreement over yesterday's post!

The Pre-Budget Report and the Return of the Rosetta Stone

2009-12-09T03:12:00.000-08:00

The Chancellor of the Exchequer Alistair Darling delivers his Pre-Budget Report today, a precarious high-wire act as he seeks to cut Britain’s massive deficit while maintaining essential public spending, all with an eye on the imminent general election. In his last report in November, the Chancellor forecast public borrowing to be 57 per cent of GDP in 2013. He got it wrong, as so many have done, his figures overtaken by the size of the current economic crisis. Last month public borrowing was already at 59.3 per cent and rising.

As historians will point out, the last 60 years or so has been the age of state expansion. In 1910, at what seemed like the imperial zenith, the British state’s public borrowing was around 10 per cent of GDP, and opposition to the growth of the state had been espoused by the likes of Ruskin, Morris and Cobbett as much as by Samuel Smiles. The figure rose to 20 per cent after the costly calamity of the First World War and, after the sea change of 1945, reached around half of GDP.

That figure may soon reach 100 per cent. What does a developed country such as Britain do other than borrow to retain its first world lifestyles? It can milk the successful financial sector in all its guises, just as Germany milks its car manufacturers, both economies over dependent on their most profitable sectors. But that is not a long-term solution: in the UK’s case it has already led the banks to adopt Byzantine methods of creating money that is not really there. Both of Britain’s major political parties know that deep down, which is why both are flailing and both are failing to offer a serious solution to Britain’s problems. Who ever won an election promising to manage decline?

One fruit of Britain’s prosperous imperial past is the British Museum, still free to the world as its charter insists (though some future Chancellor might seek amendments there). It’s been taken to task (again) by Dr Zahi Hawass, the ever entertaining Secretary General of Egypt’s Supreme Council of Antiquities. In London, to promote his new book, he has called (again) for the return to Egypt of the Rosetta Stone, currently on display in the BM’s Enlightenment Rooms. The 1.1m high stele made in 196 BC was the key to understanding Egyptian hieroglyphics, as it also has inscribed upon it parallel texts in Greek. Discovered in July 1799 by Captain Pierre-Francois Bouchard, an engineer serving with Napoleon’s army in Egypt, it came into British possession as part of the Treaty of Alexandria of 1801, arriving at the BM the following year. Hawass wants it back in Egypt though, gracefully, he is prepared to accept it on temporary loan.

Personally, I think I buy the BM’s defence of its possession of the Stone and all its other artefacts, including the Elgin Marbles, for it places them in a genuinely global context of myriad civilizations and, being in London, a genuine world city, allows millions of visitors from all around the world to see them – for free. The fact that it has done so for 250 years must count for something too. But, in the interests of fairness, here is Christopher Hitchens putting the opposite case: http://www.pbs.org/newshour/art/blog/2009/07/conversation-hitchens-cuno-debate-the-fate-of-the-parthenon-marbles.html

Moore V Marr

2009-12-08T02:05:00.000-08:00

Charles Moore has endured heroically all of Andrew Marr’s BBC TV series The Making of Modern Britain and passes judgment on it in the Telegraph today. Moore is a practiced contrarian who has it in for the BBC, but he does make valid points. Marr’s series is predictable in its establishment views, lacks the mischievousness of the best television histories (think of AJP Taylor) and the visual gimmicks are embarrassing (dodgy Home Guard uniforms, silly bathing suits etc). An opportunity missed.

Simon Jenkins on the V&A's new galleries

2009-12-04T02:56:00.000-08:00

Simon Jenkins, recipient of last year’s History Today Trustees Award, writes today on the V&A’s new Medieval and Renaissance Galleries in The Guardian. He sees the new, vast space as a starting point, a ‘taster’ before one sets out exploring the glories in situ of European culture for which there is no substitute.

Banning the building of minarets and Turkish membership of the EU

2009-12-02T02:18:00.000-08:00

All kinds of issues, all rooted in history, emerge from the controversial Swiss vote to ban further building of minarets in that strange but deeply democratic country.

It is plainly the kind of popular judgment the European Union was created to deny and is an indication of a widespread European view towards Islam, even in its rather liberal Turkish guise (most of Switzerland’s Muslims come from Turkey and the once Ottoman possessions of the former Yugoslavia). The judgment is likely to push Turkish popular opinion against the European Union, as a fascinating recent article in the Wall Street Journal pointed out (though it should also be said that the Turkish Prime Minister Erdogan’s comment that minarets are the ‘our bayonets’ was not helpful).

France has been especially hostile towards the idea of Turkish membership of the EU. Yet, it is not widely known that in the 1530s the Most Christian King of France Francis I allied with the Turk against the Very Catholic King of Spain Charles I. More typical of European attitudes towards Turkey was James IV (r.1488-1513) of Scotland’s appeal to western rulers to unite against the Ottomans, an attempt to heal European divisions caused by the ‘Warrior Pope’ Julius II, who had formed the so-called Holy League in an attempt to quell French ambitions. Perhaps Alex Salmond has been reading his history books and eyes a similar role of European peacebroker for his ‘independent’ Scotland.

Hoard Loot

2009-11-26T06:29:00.001-08:00

The Staffordshire Hoard, a small selection of which is currently on display in the British Museum, has been valued by the Treasure Valuation Committee at £3.285 million. The money will be shared between Terry Herbert, the metal detectorist who discovered the hoard, and Fred Johnson on whose land it was found. Should be a pleasant Christmas ahead for the pair of them, whose services to the study of Anglo-Saxon England are incalculable.

Baghdad to Baldock

2009-11-26T01:51:00.000-08:00

By the standards of the north Hertfordshire commuter belt, Baldock is a pleasant little settlement. Situated where the Great North Road and the Icknield Way meet, it became one of the great staging centres of early modern England, hence the large number of drinking establishments found on its wide streets, and the long list of famous folk who have passed through, including Charlies Stuart and Dickens, as well as ‘Mad’ King Ludwig of Bavaria, subject of films by Visconti and Syberberg and patron of Wagner. But the strangest thing about Baldock is that it was named after Baghdad by its founders, the Knights Templars, who established the settlement in the 12th century, a time when they had their sights on the then glorious, now benighted city on the Tigris. Are there any other unlikely places with grand names?

A History of the World

2009-11-25T03:40:00.000-08:00

The launch of a new collaboration between the British Museum and the BBC, the ambitiously titled, A History of the World took place, appropriately, in the Enlightenment Room of the BM this morning. It’s actually a History of the World ‘in 100 objects’ and the daily, 15-minute programmes will be broadcast on Radio 4 from January 18th 2010. Each one focuses on a particular object from the museum’s collection and the series will cover a wide chronological and geographical period.

Neil MacGregor, the BM’s director talked of moving away from history centred on the Mediterranean – once, literally, the ‘middle of the earth’ – to create a genuinely global history, beginning with an ancient chopper from the Olduvai Gorge in modern-day Tanzania, that tells us much about the ideas of early man. Some of the objects are especially beautiful: the colossal statue of Rameses II, for example; others, less so, but huge in their importance. Three rather ugly stubs of metal turn out to be remnants of the first transatlantic cable, created as one single 4,000-mile long object created in east Birmingham, transported to Bristol in a remarkable feat of logistics, and then laid along the bed of the ocean to join the Old World with the New for the first time. The series will be supported by an impressive interactive website with high resolution images and a children’s TV series, Relic: Guardians of the Museum.

What is especially encouraging about this series from a historical point of view is that it reaches wide and far. I have bemoaned before (and will do so again) about the elision of history with current affairs, a trend of which BBC television (and not radio) has been especially guilty. But this is a wholly admirable adventure, real history despite the inevitable roping in of ‘celebrities’: though a definition of celebrity capacious enough to include Seamus Heaney reading his translation of Beowulf, Wole Soyinka and Madhur Jaffrey is one I can live with.

One caveat was raised at the press conference. After all the talk of outreach and accessibility, why is A History of the World not being broadcast on BBC1 television, easily the BBC channel with the largest audience? Mark Damazer, controller of Radio 4, a station on a roll at the moment, talked of budgetary limitations. But the truth is, the BBC and the BM know their audience – one reason why they are so good at what they do – and it is predominantly made up of the ‘interested’ middle classes. With a third of schools failing officially to provide a decent standard of education, that’s not going to change anytime soon.

Talking of education, in the Times today, History Today contributor Andrew Roberts provides a crash course in history books for Baroness Ashton, the EU’s new foreign affairs supremo. Any list that contains Chris Wickham’s magisterial study The Inheritance of Rome (Penguin) and A World by Itself (Heinemann), the forthcoming history of the British Isles edited by Jonathan Clark (which he discusses in the January edition of History Today) gets my thumbs up.

A World by Itself

2009-11-23T05:24:00.000-08:00

The British Museum Press has rushed out a small illustrated book on The Staffordshire Hoard. Written by Kevin Leahy, a National Finds Adviser for the Portable Antiquities Scheme, and Roger Bland, Head of the BM’s Department of Portable Antiquities and Treasure, it’s a brief, authoritative account of the story so far. It costs just £4.99, a pound of which goes to the appeal fund set up to raise money for a permanent home for the hoard. Go to the British Museum's website for further details.

Anglo-Saxon Britain has been much in my thoughts after reading the opening section of A World by Itself, the new history of the British Isles edited by Jonathan Clark to be published by Heinemann in the New Year. The section written by James Campbell is as good an introduction to the period from the Roman invasion to the Conquest as I have read and bodes well for the rest of the volume. History Today staff will be naming their favourite books, TV and radio programmes, films and exhibitions of 2009 starting next week. A World by Itself may well be mentioned in the 2010 dispatches. Jonathan Clark will be sharing his thoughts on national history in the January 2010 edition of History Today.

In Our Time's Free Archive

2009-11-23T02:15:00.000-08:00

In Our Time, Melvyn Bragg’s radio 4 programme, is one the jewels of BBC broadcasting. Each Thursday the ageless Lord Bragg sits down with three distinguished panelists to discuss subjects ranging from the Anabaptists to Newton, Babylon to Dante. Today it was announced that the full 11-year archive of programmes is to be archived online, free to listeners. It’s a valuable, compelling and entertaining resource for anyone interested in history in all its remarkable diversity.

The British public: a public ill served?

2009-11-18T03:26:00.000-08:00

The number of literary festivals in Britain, many with a substantial historical input, continues to grow. The London History Festival, which finished last week, saw large numbers attending Kensington Central Library to listen to historians of the calibre of Simon Sebag Montefiore, John Adamson, Saul David and Alison Weir. Such events are now staples of middle-class British life, taking place in all regions, urban and rural.

What is the reason for their success? Could it be that television no longer caters to the ‘interested’ middle class, as Richard North calls them? That’s not to say that good television isn’t still made; it is. Witness Diarmuid MacCulloch’s History of Christianity, currently being broadcast on BBC 4. But primetime, real time terrestrial TV is by and large a motley, often degrading circus of celebrity and clamour, whose prime purpose seems to be the annulment of all thought.

So, the educated prefer to head somewhere local to listen to a Starkey, a Sebag or an Antonia Fraser. The same phenomena expresses itself in the increased audience for BBC Radios 3 and 4 (where Melvyn Bragg’s In Our Time performs a similar function for listeners interested in history) and in the rise in sales of box sets of challenging US dramas such as The Wire (a Greek tragedy made modern) and Mad Men. There are plenty of discerning, curious people around. But they are very ill served by Britain’s television programme makers.

On the subject of a public ill served, Simon Heffer, writing on today’s Queen’s Speech, claims that the current Parliament is the most despised since Cromwell threw out the Rump in 1653. Can that really be the case, and what are the other contenders?

Some Exciting Histories in the Pipeline

2009-11-17T02:32:00.000-08:00

Continuum are one of the more enterprising of our small publishing houses. Their most recent innovation is a series called – wait for it - Continuum Histories. These are small format reprints of selections from classic historical narratives introduced by a leading modern authority. The first three are already out and highly recommended: Lord Macaulay’s History of England, introduced by John Burrow; William H. Prescott’s History of the Conquest of Mexico, introduced by John Elliott; and J.A. Froude’s The Reign of Mary Tudor introduced by Eamon Duffy.

They make excellent introductions to anyone concerned with the shifting sands of historiography or serve as handy reminders to those who engaged with the ‘history of history’ at university. Burrow, author of one of the best general introductions to historiography, A History of Histories (Penguin, 20007), is especially good on the great Whig historian who, whatever his faults – most notably a deluded faith in progress – wrote in magnificent prose to an enormous audience. There really is no serious historian of such popular appeal today. Future titles in the Continuum Histories include Thomas Carlyle’s The French Revolution introduced by Ruth Scurr; and, one I am really looking forward to reading, Edward Gibbon’s Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire introduced by the excellent Tom Holland.

The London History Festival

2009-11-10T05:50:00.000-08:00

History Today contributor Tristram Hunt writes today in the Guardian on the Staffordshire Hoard and the importance of it being sited permanently in what was once Mercia (ie the West Midlands and Staffordshire). He appeals to the wealthy burghers of the regions (yes, they do still exist, despite recession and the collapse of manufacturing in the region) to put their hands deep in the pockets and give the Hoard a home worthy of its historic importance:

‘ Those Black Country industrialists, Staffordshire landowners, Sutton Coldfield professionals and Birmingham business people need to find their inner Anglo-Saxon. For what the hoard reveals is that their seventh-century forebears, those righteous conquerors and wealthy warlords, were determined to use their prosperity to support art, crafts and design. These treasures, with their eagle miniatures, biblical inscriptions and thousands of inlaid garnets, show a kingdom replete with affluence and cultural confidence. The West Midlands wealthy have an unprecedented opportunity to ensure that future generations have ready access to this incredible insight into their identity and heritage.'

Tonight, the BBC’s foreign correspondent David Loyn, who writes on Afghanistan in the forthcoming issue of History Today, is in conversation with Stephen Robinson, Stephen Grey and Colin Freeman, Chief Foreign Correspondent for the Sunday Telegraph (who was freed from the clutches of Somali pirates earlier this year) at Kensington Central Library. The distinguished panel will discuss the history of war reporting. It’s part of the first and very successful London History Festival which concludes on Thursday when I talk to Simon Scarrow, Patrick Mercer MP and Saul David about their recent forays into historical fiction.

Go to www.londonhistoryfestival.com for full details.

Tristram Hunt describes how Friedrich Engels financed the research behind his friend Karl Marx’s epic critique of the free market, Das Kapital, in No Marx Without Engels

Simon Jenkins on the new Ashmolean Museum

2009-11-06T04:50:00.000-08:00

Simon Jenkins, recipient of the History Today Trustees Award for 2008, today writes about Oxford’s revamped and extended Ashmolean Museum in his Guardian column. He describes the Ashmolean, which reopens to the public tomorrow, as ‘the most exciting museum anywhere in Britain’. Peter Furtado, my predecessor as History Today editor and an Oxford resident, will review the new Ashmolean Museum here on Monday.

Jenkins, though full of praise for the Ashmolean, has some reservations about the disjuncture in style between the early Victorian architecture of CR Cockerell and Rick Mather’s new hi-tech galleries, fashionably white. On a more elegiac note, Jenkins concludes:

‘The big museum project must surely be coming to an end, at least in the western
world. The public sector is financially exhausted and private money and fancy
architecture are turning elsewhere – in Boris Johnson's London, to the high-rise
luxury flat.
‘Fine arts will return to the Latin quarters, to local galleries
and private collectors. Britain may see a revulsion against the giant
accumulator museums such as the Ashmolean and the London megaliths, with their
miles of underground shelving stashed with works kept from public view.
Provincial galleries may start claiming some of the nation's loot of ages, and
may get it. Such cash as is available may go their way.
‘The more reason to
greet this last cry of the old regime, confident in both its display and its
argument. We may not see its like again.’

http://www.ashmolean.org/

The Grierson Awards

2009-11-04T05:56:00.000-08:00

At the Grierson Awards last night, the annual jamboree for documentary film-makers, the History Today Award for Best Historical Documentary went to John Dower for Thriller in Manila, a look at the world heavyweight title fight between Muhammad Ali and ‘Smokin’’ Joe Frazier. It was original in the fact that it is told from the point of view of Frazier, a bull of a man still plainly hurt by the caustic verbal assault Ali unleashed upon him in the build up to the fight, calling him, among many other things, ‘gorilla’ and ‘Uncle Tom’.

I was part of the judging process, which included historians such as Diarmaid MacCulloch (author of an interesting recent article on the Papal appeal to disgruntled Anglicans) and Anna Whitelock, as well as a host of documentary filmmakers. For me, the process raised a number of points.

Almost certainly for reasons of archive, the 20th century dominates history documentaries. It was really quite striking how few documentaries are made about the Middle Ages, the early modern period and the Classical world, eras which are hugely popular among those who consume their history in print. Only a few major historians, most notably David Starkey, get to present serious television histories set in the distant past, and even then it’s the Tudors. Is television unable to convey the realities of life previous to the 20th century, or are film-makers simply unwilling to tackle serious history?

By the way, the host of last night’s awards, Andrew Marr, a former winner himself, is currently in the midst of an entertaining spat with the Daily Telegraph’s Charles Moore over the ‘left-wing’ bias of his new BBC history of (stifle the yawn) 20th-century Britain. Oh for a big-budget history series on the Civil Wars, the Glorious Revolution or the Anglo-Saxons.

Peter Furtado introduces the remarkable work of award-winning historical documentary film-maker Norma Percy, in Can TV Make History?

Where Will the Hoard Call Home?

2009-11-03T03:39:00.000-08:00

A small but exquisite selection of objects from the Staffordshire Hoard go on temporary public display today in Gallery 37 of the British Museum today.

It coincides with the launch of the Portable Antiquities and Treasure Annual Report 2007, the scheme, unique in Europe, which made possible the acquisition, examination and evaluation of the hoard. The display also includes a number of objects whose discovery was recorded in 2007 including a Roman copper-alloy figure of Cautopates, one of the attendants of the god Mithras, who was popular with Roman soldiers stationed in Britain; selections from the 10th-century Viking Hoard unearthed in the Vale of York, including Carolingian, Islamic and Anglo-Saxon coins; and a medieval silver piedfort – possibly a reckoning counter for officials - from the mid-1350s and struck in the name of Edward III as Duke of Aquitaine.

At the press conference, it was confirmed that the Staffordshire Hoard will find a permanent home in the West Midlands, though such is its size, the British Museum is always likely to have a selection on display. Staff from Birmingham City Museum and Art Gallery (BMAG) and the Potteries Museum in Stoke on Trent are working on those long-term proposals now. For curators, this is a once in a lifetime opportunity, as Rita McLean, Head of Birmingham Museums and Heritage, was eager to stress.

Death of David Underdown

2009-10-28T05:50:00.000-07:00

Read my obituary to one of the most original of the scholars of early modern England born between the wars, David Underdown, in the Guardian. Underdown was author of Pride's Purge: Politics in the Puritan Revolution (1971)

Almost four decades on, the book remains a fixture of undergraduate reading lists. Underdown went on to pioneer the study of local history, popular politics, gender and sport... [he] combined a prose style of enviable clarity with a complete mastery of the archive.

David Underdown looks back to the Tudor age while discussing the upheavals of the mid-17th century, in What Was the English Revolution?

The BNP Sturm und Drang

2009-10-26T04:58:00.000-07:00

There has been much Sturm und Drang over the performance of the British National Party’s ‘Nick’ Griffin on BBC’s Question Time last Thursday. Reluctant to spill forth more, let us leave the final word on why fascism and Englishness remain anathema to one another, to Daniel Defoe and his poem of 1703, the True Born Englishman. Impure, inauthentic and proud of it.

Thus from a mixture of all kinds began,
That het’rogeneous thing, an Englishman:
In eager rapes, and furious lust begot,
Betwixt a painted Britain and a Scot.
Whose gend’ring off-spring quickly learn’d to bow,
And yoke their heifers to the Roman plough:
From whence a mongrel half-bred race there came,
With neither name, nor nation, speech nor fame.
In whose hot veins new mixtures quickly ran,
Infus’d betwixt a Saxon and a Dane.
While their rank daughters, to their parents just,
Receiv’d all nations with promiscuous lust.
This nauseous brood directly did contain
The well-extracted blood of Englishmen.

Which medly canton’d in a heptarchy,
A rhapsody of nations to supply,
Among themselves maintain’d eternal wars,
And still the ladies lov’d the conquerors.

The western Angles all the rest subdu’d;
A bloody nation, barbarous and rude:
Who by the tenure of the sword possest
One part of Britain, and subdu’d the rest
And as great things denominate the small,
The conqu’ring part gave title to the whole.
The Scot, Pict, Britain, Roman, Dane, submit,
And with the English-Saxon all unite:
And these the mixture have so close pursu’d,
The very name and memory’s subdu’d:
No Roman now, no Britain does remain;
Wales strove to separate, but strove in vain:
The silent nations undistinguish’d fall,
And Englishman’s the common name for all.
Fate jumbled them together, God knows how;
What e’er they were they’re true-born English now.

The wonder which remains is at our pride,
To value that which all wise men deride.
For Englishmen to boast of generation,
Cancels their knowledge, and lampoons the nation.
A true-born Englishman’s a contradiction,
In speech an irony, in fact a fiction.
A banter made to be a test of fools,
Which those that use it justly ridicules.
A metaphor invented to express
A man a-kin to all the universe.

For as the Scots, as learned men ha’ said,
Throughout the world their wand’ring seed ha’ spread;
So open-handed England, ’tis believ’d,
Has all the gleanings of the world receiv’d.

Some think of England ’twas our Saviour meant,
The Gospel should to all the world be sent:
Since, when the blessed sound did hither reach,
They to all nations might be said to preach.

’Tis well that virtue gives nobility,
How shall we else the want of birth and blood supply?
Since scarce one family is left alive,
Which does not from some foreigner derive.

Even so, there is justified concern for Britain’s and especially England’s ‘white working class’, excluded from the benefits of globalisation and technological innovation. Places such as Dewsbury in West Yorkshire, Burnley in East Lancashire, parts of the West Midlands and the East End overspill of Barking and Thurrock have become the strongholds of the BNP. Social mobility has all but disappeared in these areas. The key to understanding why is the subject of Robert Skidelsky’s chapter in Heinemann’s superb new history of the British Isles, A World By Itself, edited by Jonathan Clark to be published in January. Here is a salient extract:

‘The abolition of the free grammar schools in the 1960s and 1970s stands out as a milestone in the failure to sustain a culture based on middle-class values. The grammar schools, being the main conduit of higher-order cultural values to the working class, offered Britain its best opportunity to build a high-quality culture divorced from class. The opportunity was lost because their meritocratic ideal ran counter to both middle-class exclusiveness and working-class egalitarianism. The disappearance of the grammar schools accentuated the cultural divide between the high brow and the low brow. As prosperity spread, the working class became middle class in income, but not in taste.’

Now even the income has all but disappeared, what’s left? BNP or X-Factor. Hopefully, the latter. That’s a difficult sentence to write.

(Credit to Andrew Sullivan for Daniel Defoe extract)

The State Of Afghanistan - Past, Present and Future

2009-10-20T07:37:00.000-07:00

This Friday I will be chairing an evening at the Phoenix Theatre in London’s Charing Cross Rd where BBC Correspondent David Loyn and War Correspondent Sam Kiley will discuss their latest books and the war in Afghanistan.

It promises to be an illuminating evening.

Tickets are £3 and the event starts at 7pm.Contact marcus.gipps@blackwell.co.uk to reserve tickets.

Underdown's Start of Play

2009-10-08T10:22:00.000-07:00

Mercurius Politicus reports on the sad death of David Underdown, the early modern historian. The site mentions three fine studies by Underdown, including Pride’s Purge which remains arguably the best history of that remarkable event. But I have a particular affection for Start of Play, his account of the origins of cricket. I have read the work twice already. As the weather turns colder, I feel like reading it again as a pleasurable and erudite memorial to this brilliant scholar.

Wolf Hall Wins the Booker

2009-10-07T07:07:00.000-07:00

Hilary Mantel has won this year’s Man Booker Prize for her novel Wolf Hall, based on the life of Thomas Cromwell. Stella Tillyard reviews it in the current issue of History Today which also features an overview of the current state of the historical novel including comments from Mantel herself.

Kathryn Hadley, on our news blog, also recently asked what real value these types of books bring to the field of historical research?

Wolf Hall has met with considerable acclaim although David Starkey, one of our leading Tudor historians, described it as ‘historical tosh’.

Golden Days of the Second City

2009-10-01T04:04:00.000-07:00

Richard Morrison wrote a celebratory piece about the Staffordshire Hoard yesterday, commenting upon the 10,00-strong horde who queued to get in to Birmingham Museum and Art Gallery over the weekend to view the ‘stash of 1,300 Anglo-Saxon artefacts found in a field outside Walsall’.

Morrison goes on to claim that the exhibition is the most exciting thing to have happened to Brum since Aston Villa won the Inter-Toto Cup. But Morrison hugely underestimates the importance of the Hoard. It’s the most exciting thing to happen in the Second City since Aston Villa won the European Cup in 1982!

The Future of the Staffordshire Hoard

2009-09-29T02:26:00.001-07:00

Over 10,000 people visited Birmingham Museum and Art Gallery in the first three days of the Staffordshire Hoard going on display. The exhibition continues until October 13th after which the Hoard will transfer to the British Museum for further evaluation. The British Museum has agreed that any permanent display should be near to where the Hoard was found.

Why Are Museums Free?

2009-09-28T01:54:00.000-07:00

Further to issues raised by our previous posts on the British Museum’s new Moctezuma exhibition, Ian Jack also questions the free entry policy of Britain’s major museums, while Philip Hensher, not a man to mince his words, launches a caustic critique of what we now call Mexica culture, especially its propensity for human sacrifice.

Hill's Handsome Coins

2009-09-25T09:18:00.000-07:00

One can’t help thinking of Geoffrey Hill, our greatest living poet, in relation to the Staffordshire Hoard (despite him being a man of Worcestershire). Here’s a particularly resonant passage from his masterly Mercian Hymns:

'Coins handsome as Nero’s; of good substance and weight.
Offa Rex resonant in silver, and the names of his moneyers.
They struck with accountable tact. They could alter the king’s face.

Exactness of design was to deter imitation; mutilation if that failed.
Exemplary metal, ripe for commerce.
Value from a sparse people, scrapers of salt-pans and byres.

Swathed bodies in the long ditch; one eye upstaring.
It is safe to presume, here, the king’s anger.
He reigned 40 years. Seasons touched and retouched the soil.'

Who Invented Calculus?

2009-09-25T02:59:00.000-07:00

There was a fascinating episode broadcast yesterday of In Our Time, the superb Radio 4 series hosted by Melvyn Bragg. It dealt with the often vicious intellectual battle over who invented calculus, Leibniz or Newton? The panel of guests were remarkably lucid: History Today contributor Patricia Fara, Simon Schaffer, Professor of History of Science at Cambridge and Jackie Stedall, lecturer in the History of Mathematics at Oxford. What made the episode such fantastic entertainment was the tension between Bragg trying to pin down the importance of the discoveries and the experts’ attempts to move way beyond the ken of the average listener. Listeners discovered that Newton approached the problem using geometry while Leibniz adopted the traditional European algebraic techniques. Being a non-scientist, I have always found this area a challenging one and this has become even more apparent of late as I have been editing an article by Michael Hunter on Newton’s great contemporary Robert Boyle for the November edition of History Today. But it is hugely satisfying when one begins to understand, even just a little, the nature of scientific advance. I recommend that you listen to the programme, which is available on BBC iplayer.

More on the Staffordshire Hoard

2009-09-25T02:08:00.000-07:00

The more information that emerges about the Staffordshire Hoard, the more remarkable it seems. Two years ago, the British Museum paid £125,000 for an Anglo-Saxon sword handle. There are 310 such parts in the new hoard! Leslie Webster, a former BM curator could, understandably, hardly control his excitement: ‘It will make everyone think again about rising and falling kingdoms, the transition from paganism to Christianity, the conduct of battle and the nature of fine metalwork.’ It appears that some of the objects in the hoard came from as a far away as Byzantium and modern-day Sri Lanka.

The identity of the person responsible for the discovery has been revealed. Terry Herbert, a 55-year-old former coffin maker from Walsall, found the vast hoard using his 14-year-old metal detector on farmland owned by a friend (who has since sold it), believed to be near Lichfield. Mr Herbert and his friend will soon be very wealthy men indeed; the coroner in nearby Cannock declared the find a treasure trove and a committee is currently evaluating its worth. The amount of gold is so large that there are fears it may have a depressive effect on the gold market. Mr Herbert though seems nonplussed, dealing with the media in the typically deadpan delivery of a true Black Countryman. Only once did romance get a hold of him, when he declared that the find was his destiny: ‘I have this phrase,’ he told the assembled throng of the world’s media,’ that I say sometimes, “Spirits of yesteryear take me where the coins appear”, but on that day I changed coins to gold.’ He has changed our understanding of Anglo-Saxon history too.

A sample of the hoard goes on display at Birmingham Museum and Art Gallery today until October 13th. I thoroughly recommend their excellent Edwardian Tea Room.

Duncan Slarke of the Portable Antiquities Scheme was the first archaeologist to see the hoard. An interview is available on the Birmingham News Room website.

A new website devoted to the Staffordshire Hoard has also recently gone live providing images of some of the objects, a history and various interpretations of the find.

Visit our Anglo-Saxon focus page for further information on the period as a whole.

Images: (Staffordshire Hoard website)

- Gold strip with a biblical inscription

- Gold helmet cheek piece

First Impressions: The Staffordshire Hoard

2009-09-24T08:10:00.000-07:00

The Staffordshire Hoard, first discovered on private land in July 2009 and now revealed to the world, has gained widespread publicity, much to the delight of scholars of Anglo-Saxon England always keen to publicise their somewhat neglected field. The claim made at the press conference yesterday that it is a ‘treasure that will rewrite history’ appears to be considerably more than hyperbole. It is by far the largest find of Anglo-Saxon gold ever found: 5kg of gold, to be exact, as well as 1.3kg of silver. That’s five times the amount of gold found at Sutton Hoo. One strip of gold bears a Biblical inscription, from the Book of Numbers, in Latin: ‘Surge domine et dissipentur intimici tui et fugiant qui oderunt te a facie tua (Rise up, O Lord and may thy enemies be dispersed and those who hate thee be driven from thy face). This particular object has already stirred up controversy, with some academics arguing that it dates from eighth or ninth centuries, others saying that the style of lettering suggests the seventh century, a period for which there is sparse material evidence.

Dr Kevin Leahy, the Portable Antiquities Scheme’s National Finds Adviser, has been responsible for cataloguing the find. ‘The two most striking features of the hoard,’ he claims, ‘are that it is unbalanced and it is of exceptionally high quality. Unbalanced because of what we don’t find. There is absolutely nothing feminine. There are no dress fittings, brooches or pendants. The vast majority of items in the hoard are martial.

‘The quantity of the gold is amazing but, more importantly, the craftsmanship is consummate. This was the very best that the Anglo-Saxon metalworkers could do and they were very good. Its origins are clearly the highest levels of Anglo-Saxon aristocracy or royalty.

‘It looks like a collection of trophies, but it is impossible to say if the hoard was the spoils from a single battle or a long and successful military career. We cannot say who the original or the final owners were, who took it from them, why they buried it or when. It will be debated for decades.’

Prof Helena Hamerow of the Institute of Archaeology at Oxford University, also foresees decades of debate about the nature of the hoard. It’s hard to envisage the context. It appears to date from the time of the Mercian supremacy around the time of Offa, the eighth century, though the objects range across several centuries. They’ve been stripped of their nice bits, which suggest that the metals may have been collected in order to recycle or to be used as bullion. What is really important about this find is that, hitherto, the material evidence of Anglo-Saxon England has never reflected the wealth of the society that is claimed in contemporary documents. Bede, for example, often refers to the magnificence of Anglo-Saxon England, but finds of this kind from that time have been far more common in southern Scandinavia or France. Now, all that has changed. We will now have a much better picture of a very exciting period, when England became part of European culture.

‘The interest in the find is good for Anglo-Saxon studies too,’ says Hamerow. ‘It’s been a long time since Sutton Hoo, and it’s nice to see your subject talked about.’

Even so, that didn’t stop one eminent archaeologist, whose name will remain secret, claim that he would swap the entire find for one Anglo-Saxon document. There’s no pleasing some people.

2009-09-23T07:54:00.000-07:00

Today I attended the press preview of the British Museum’s new exhibition Moctezuma: Aztec Ruler. I have been somewhat underwhelmed by the BM’s series of exhibitions exploring power and empire and this, the fourth in the series, is no different. Moctezuma (that’s the Spanish spelling, which is more accurate than the English ‘corruption’ apparently) emerges as a very insubstantial figure: not even the circumstances of his death are really understood.

A rather embarrassing, much pitied figure in Mexico, his status as a ruler appears to owe a great deal to European ideals of the ‘Noble Savage’. Even so, there are many lovely objects to admire: a delicate obsidian knife (too delicate for human sacrifice); wonderful turquoise masks (though the best is one from the BM’s permanent collection); plus a fascinating model of the sacred centre of Moctezuma’s capital; an array of supremely strange gods; and some very interesting explanations of the Mexica’s highly complex calendar.

‘Mexica?’ you ask. Well that’s the name (pronounced ‘Mesheeka’) that the Aztecs (sorry, Mexica) knew themselves by, as did their Spanish conquerors, and it is, of course, after which Mexico is named. So why is the exhibition called Moctezuma: Aztec Ruler? Presumably because the BM thinks punters won’t know who the Mexica were but will hand over a scandalous £12 (yes, £12!) for the privilege of getting intimate with an Aztec. Then they’ll emerge from the Reading Room having considered the fate of Moctezuma only to be bombarded with stacks of expensive tat, with chocolate to the fore (after all the often patronising audio commentary to the exhibition, with its references to ‘brave Moctezuma’, appears to be aimed at children).

Would it not be better for the BM, an institution I cherish, to charge ALL visitors £2 to enter the permanent exhibitions and, say, £5 to special exhibitions, rather than charge £12 to see a display such as Moctezuma?

The exhibition opens tomorrow.

Sean Lang on History Teaching

2009-09-18T09:17:00.000-07:00

There is an excellent letter by Sean Lang on the controversy surrounding the teaching of history published in today’s Independent. Sean, senior lecturer in history at Anglia Ruskin University, honorary secretary of the Historical Association and a passionate advocate for the discipline, knows of what he speaks. His letter is a firm corrective to some of the ignorant assertions made by some members of the commentariat.

Johnson, Boswell & Knowledge for All

2009-09-18T02:26:00.000-07:00

Today is the 300th anniversary of the birth of Samuel Johnson. Lichfield, the cathedral city in Staffordshire where he was born, hosts a weekend of celebrations beginning in the Market Square at 5.30pm this evening. His London House, at Gough Square in the City of London is free to enter all day. Cake will be available.

High Church Anglican, Tory, moralist, Londoner, lexicographer, tea drinker, xenophobe, Shakespearean, satirist, conversationalist: there is much to admire in Johnson’s prodigious output.

His Preface to Shakespeare remains the best introduction to the Bard; his curious novella Rasselas, echoes contemporary concerns about the strangeness of the ‘other’; his essays in The Rambler and his sketches of a familiarly venal Parliament remain as incisive and witty as when they were cast.

But it is The Life, brilliantly documented by his companion James Boswell, that is the true measure of this remarkable man. Having made his way to London on foot in the company of the aspiring actor David Garrick, Johnson knew long periods of poverty before acclaim and public honour came his way. He never lost his compassion and sympathy for his fellow man, the belief that knowledge should be available to all who sought it. There are many examples of this humanity, but one will suffice, an extract from Boswell’s The Life:

‘On Saturday July 30 [1763], Dr Johnson and I took a sculler at the Temple-stairs, and set out for Greenwich. I asked him if he really thought a knowledge of the Greek and Latin languages an essential requisite to a good education.
JOHNSON: ‘Most certainly, sir; for those who know them have a very great advantage over those who do not. Nay, sir, it is wonderful what a difference learning makes upon people even in the common intercourse of life, which does not appear to be much connected with it’.
‘And yet (said I) people go through the world very well, and carery on the business of life to good advantage, without learning.’
JOHNSON: ‘Why, sir, that may be true in cases where learning cannot possibly be of any use; for instance, this boy rows as well without learning, as if he could sing the song of Orpheus to the Argonauts, who were the first sailors.’
He then called to the boy, ‘What would you give, my lad, to know about the Argonauts?’
‘Sir, (said the boy,) I would give what I have.’
Johnson was much pleased with his answer, and we gave him a double fare.
Dr Johnson then turning to me, ‘Sir, (said he) a desire of knowledge is the natural feeling of mankind; and every human being, whose mind is not debauched, will be willing to give all that he has to get knowledge.’

Today, raise a cup of his favourite cha to the Great Cham.

Our Debt to Dr Johnson

On the tercentenary of the famous London writer’s birth, Peter Martin celebrates the legacy of a man admired for his insight and humanity, qualities forged in the darker and less well analysed episodes of his life.

From our September 2009 Issue

History in Britain's Schools

2009-09-15T07:12:00.000-07:00

The debate on the teaching of History in Britain’s schools continues with the modern historian Dominic Sandbrook writing in today’s Daily Telegraph. The bestselling author of White Heat: A History of Britain in the Swinging Sixties (Abacus) puts much of the blame on ‘progressive educationists’ who ‘did away with old-fashioned essay questions and replaced them with empathy exercises and multiple-choice quizzes that sacrificed any sense of intellectual depth or discipline’. He also points out that it was the last Conservative government who downgraded history from a compulsory to an optional subject at the age of 16; neither major party emerges with much credit on this matter.

Sandbrook concludes that the study of History,

‘ought to be the centrepiece of the education system, a long and thoughtful expedition, not a botched and half-hearted day-trip to which most children are no longer invited. And one day, I suspect, we will look back and judge that our Government’s ignorance and neglect of that wonderful, dazzling, irresistible country was among the greatest of its failures and the most unforgivable of its many betrayals.’

Who could disagree?

One further point. Following on from Tristram Hunt and Ann Whitelock’s endorsement of H.E. Marshall’s Our Island Story in our current edition (Terry Deary: History Made Horrible?, September 2009), Sandbrook makes the claim that this children’s history of England, published in 1905 (!), ‘still gives a more entertaining overall account of our national story than most modern textbooks’. Surely it is not beyond a publisher to create a modern version of this potentially huge bestseller. I'm off to talk with my agent.

A Tragedy of History Teaching

2009-09-14T05:41:00.000-07:00

There have been a number of reports, most recently in yesterday’s Observer, noting a remarkable resurgence of interest in the past. This is reflected, for example, in the shortlist for the Booker Prize. All the novels nominated are examples of historical fiction (the subject of our Signposts column in the forthcoming October History Today). Yet this growing interest in Britain’s past comes at a time when only 30 per cent of pupils take History at GCSE level and, as a Historical Association (HA) survey confirms, in the curriculum of some schools History is disappearing as a discrete. This is not because History is an unpopular subject. As the report states: ‘Those schools that allocate more than an hour a week to history for 13-14 years olds, or which are increasing the time they allocate to history, are significantly more likely to see an increase rather than a decrease in GCSE uptake’.

Perhaps the most disturbing finding of the HA’s report is that while ‘over 90 per cent of independent and grammar schools represented teach history as an entirely separate subject . . . only 72.3 per cent of the comprehensives and 59.1 of the academies that responded do so. ’

It is unacceptable, say the report’s authors, to preserve the study of History ‘only for the high attainers’ for the discipline ‘encourages mutual understanding of the historic origins of our ethnic and cultural diversity, and helps pupils become confident and questioning individuals’. The study of History, the report continues, ‘prepares pupils for the future, equipping them with knowledge and skills that are prized in adult life, enhancing employability and developing an ability to take part in democratic society.’

It may also be worth pointing out amid these utilitarian enconiums that History is worth studying simply because, as Chris Wickham, Chichele Professor of Medieval History at Oxford University, wrote in History Today, ‘it is simply very interesting’.

As for why this has happened, the report points to the Government’s obsession with league tables:

‘Students have been deliberately denied an opportunity to study history by forcing them down vocational or academic pathways. GCSE students have also been taken off courses against their wishes to do BTEC (Business and Technology Education Council) qualifications in six months so that the school can boost its position in the league tables. This has happened to students who were otherwise on target for a C/B in History but who were doing badly on their other subject.

Given the choice, it seems that pupils across a wide range of abilities have a passion for History. It is a tragedy that so many are denied access to an understanding of the past.

Thatcher's Opposition to German Unity

2009-09-11T02:14:00.000-07:00

The media carry a number of reports this morning (most notably, here and here) on the release by the Foreign and Commonwealth Office of documents relating to British policy towards German reunification during 1989-90. All the reports are essentially the same: that Margaret Thatcher, then Prime Minister, was the principle opponent among European leaders to a united Germany. This may suggest that Thatcher was something of an antedeluvian, out of step with the optimism born of the fall of the Berlin Wall, a little Englander unable to think beyond the Manichean myths that grew up in Britain around the Second World War. But, having attended the FCO’s briefing on the release of the papers given by the resident historian Patrick Salmon and having delved through some of the passages, I think this is an unfair and simplistic representation of Thatcher’s position.

Thatcher sought to see the issue of German reunification through the prism of history and called a meeting with historians of Germany at Chequers on March 18th, 1990. Her agenda at that meeting is illuminating:

‘We must widen the discussion to include the future of the USSR and whether we pursue spheres of influence or alliances of democracy or geographical alliances. We cannot completely disregard history for the various empires and maritime states have girdled the globe. We must therefore consider some of the old balance of power. But it seems to me that, while in the past, history was determined largely by the personalities and ambitions of the rulers of the people, in future it will be decided much more by the character of the people. However, the lesson of the past two years is that neither character nor pride has been suffocated by oppression.’

Thatcher was very close to Gorbachev at the time and did not wish to see his Soviet reform project set back by Russian fears about a new invigorated Germany, however unthreatening. The passage about the future being decided more by the character of the people looks like wishful thinking however on Thatcher’s part. Opposed to European political union, she no doubt saw the democratisation of central and eastern Europe as an opportunity to make the EU more accountable, giving the ‘people’ rather than the ‘rulers’ a greater say. Douglas Hurd, her foreign secretary, and William Waldegrave, Minister of State at the Foreign Office argued for the speedy reunification of Germany – what was called the ‘Tommy Cooper’ option, ‘just like that’ - and this, in a sense demonstrated a clash between people and rulers. Both Hurd and Waldegrave were patrician Tories, ‘first class minds’ (though citizens of the former Yugoslavia may not necessarily concur), born to power. Thatcher was a vote-winning liberal. And it may be the case that her anti-German sensibilities were in part populist, a nod to domestic concerns.

None of this though explains the prejudice (if that is the word) Thatcher felt towards the Germans. Was it simply nostalgia for wartime Britain, English parochialism, her admiration for Churchill that informed her view? She did engage with historians on the subject. Perhaps part of the answer can be found in her memoirs in which she talks movingly of her childhood encounters with Jewish refugee children; of the support given by many in the Jewish community of her North London constituency of Finchley Central; and of her deep friendship with the Chief Rabbi Lord Jakobovitz. Thatcher’s suspicions seem rooted in her philosemitism. This aspect deserves greater prominence in the story of this fascinating period.

Conflicts of Interest

2009-09-10T10:06:00.000-07:00

The National Army Museum’s new exhibition, Conflicts of Interest opens this Saturday, September 12th. It follows on from Helmand, the acclaimed and uncompromising look at a tour of duty in Afghanistan by members of 16 Air Assault Brigade.

This new display examines the conflicts and peacekeeping missions which have involved the British Army over the last three decades. What becomes immediately apparent is that the British Army has done an awful lot of fighting during that time, with the Parachute Regiment at the forefront. Some campaigns have been hugely successful (the Falklands, Sierra Leone, the First Gulf War), others controversial (Northern Ireland, Kosovo, the Iraq War, Afghanistan) and the sheer number of them is emphasised by the somewhat overwhelming nature of the exhibition. It’s a large room but feels claustrophobic, like a maze, bombarded by a torrent of sound and vision where the barren wastes of Iraq and the tight terraced streets of Belfast seem too close together. But what a wealth of material. Visceral, articulate accounts from officers and men; vivid paintings by John Keane, a war artist never afraid to confront his fears as he accompanies frontline troops; candid personal photographs of soldiers fighting, sleeping, returning home to loved ones, marriages, Brits v Aussies playing cricket in the Desert Ashes. There are the medals, including a posthumous VC and OBE, of Colonel ‘H’ Jones, Falklands hero; an officer’s desert fatigues reduced to threads by a mixture of the desert climate and the wear of body armour; the piece of shrapnel embedded in the helmet of a corporal while fighting drug-crazy gangs in Sierra Leone.

Among the most interesting aspects of the exhibition is the change in attitudes towards difference in the army: one chart reveals that the Army is strikingly more diverse in terms of religious belief than British society as a whole. Uniformed soldiers now join – and are allowed to join – Gay Pride Marches. Women have a greater profile than at any point in the Army’s history (there’s a pregnant soldier’s uniform on display). The concerns of the British Army inevitably reflect those of wider society as this thoughtful and fascinating exhibition makes explicit.

The Beatles' Britain

2009-09-09T05:49:00.000-07:00

Alan Turing, subject of a recent post, was far from the only victim of Britain’s once barbaric laws against homosexuality. The ever insightful Danny Finkelstein today draws attention to the plight and the importance of Brian Epstein, the son of a wealthy Liverpool furniture store owner who saw the potential of The Beatles and, as their manager, played a major part in their fulfilment. He died in 1967 of a drugs overdose. He was 32.

Today sees the release of The Beatles remastered back catalogue on CD, the high price of which reflects EMI’s (justified) confidence in the band’s continuing appeal yet which may also signal the last gasp of the traditional recording industry. Over the last week, the BBC has broadcast considerable amounts of new Beatles material on TV and radio which remind us of the hot-house atmosphere in which the band operated in their short public career of seven years.

What perhaps remains most astonishing is the way they glided into the public consciousness of a United States still reeling from the death of President Kennedy, gaining record television audiences and becoming a fixture of American popular culture.

There are some questions I think worth pondering by historians of the period. How much were The Beatles a culmination of a particular kind of British popular culture – marked by mastery of technique, a romantic, sometimes surreal and humorous vision of Englishness and a very old fashioned work ethic – and how much were they part of a paradigm shift towards globalisation, the current dominance of the English language and the ubiquity of youth culture? Probably something of both.

And, to think counterfactually, what would Britain’s reputation be like had they never gained the public attention Brian Epstein so skilfully garnered for them? Undoubtedly, the Beatles phenomenon, especially their success in the US, pointed towards the opportunities available in the creative industries to a once powerful country whose manufacturing base was in terminal decline. They gave Britain an enormous fillip in the process (exploited shamelessly by Prime Minister Harold Wilson) and established a British role in global popular culture wholly disproportionate to its size which lingers to this day.

Churchill’s state funeral of January 1965 saw the passing of one Britain; the imminent release of Rubber Soul confirmed the triumph of another. But, in their Englishness, their love affair with America, their originality, their popular appeal and their magical ability to make people feel good about themselves and the world, the old warrior and the new superstars had much in common.

Read the following related articles from our archive:

‘You Say You Want a Revolution’

Mikhail Safonov argues that the Beatles did more for the break up of totalitarianism in the USSR than Alexander Solzhenitsyn and Andrei Sakharov.

Street-Fighting Men

Gerard DeGroot takes a critical view of the student protests in Europe and the US in 1968, and the subsequent tendency of the Left to view these events through rose-tinted shades.

Finest Years: Churchill as Warlord 1940-45

2009-09-08T02:40:00.000-07:00

Among the many excellent books released to mark the 70th anniversary of the outbreak of the Second World War – Andrew Roberts' The Storm of War, Richard Overy’s 1939, Carlo D’Este’s Warlord – the one I have enjoyed most is Max Hastings’ Finest Years: Churchill as Warlord 1940-45 (Harper Press). Highly critical but ultimately admiring of the great man, it is like all Hastings’ books extremely well written. It’s full of little insights into the character of the man.

Churchill’s prodigious memory has been noted before, but it’s what he remembered, passages of poetry and prose, that take us deeper into his character. Always aware of destiny unfolding and of the judgement of history, Churchill would repeat Marvell’s lines on the conduct of Charles I as he faced execution: ‘He nothing common did or mean upon that memorable scene’. Having heard the brilliant 28-year-old scientific intelligence officer R.V. Jones tell him all he knew about the technology that allowed the RAF to block the Luftwaffe’s electronic guidance systems, a hugely encouraged Churchill instantly recalled a line from the 19th-century folklore collection, The Ingolds by Legends: ‘But now one Mr Jones/ Comes forth and depones/ That 15 years since, he had heard certain groans’. It was the kind of wit that softened the hearts of the many close to Churchill who had to endure his punishing demands, his irascibility and, not infrequently, the outpourings of depression. As the war dragged on, Churchill, always sentimental, became increasingly tearful. Even during the early days of the war, Hastings recounts that Churchill, being driven past a queue of civilians, asked what they were queuing for. ‘Birdseed,’ came the reply, at which point Churchill wept. For all Churchill’s faults, Hastings portrays him as a leader of immense humanity enhanced by his failings.

A Trip Inland

2009-09-04T07:40:00.000-07:00

Over the Bank Holiday I took a ride out of London up to the curious checkerboard of counties to the north-east of the capital – Rutland, Huntingdonshire, Northamptonshire, Cambridge – visiting the pretty market town of Uppingham with its imposing, fortress-like public school (alma mater of Stephen Fry among others), one of a number in the area, most notably Oakham and Oundle. South-east of there lies the hamlet of Little Gidding, immortalised in T.S. Eliot’s trilogy of the same name, collected in the Four Quartets. It is a poem of brilliant historical imagination,

High Tory in its sympathy, conciliatory in its message, written at a time when Britain was fighting for its very existence, calling on the resources of the past to create a brighter future.

Seeing the tiny chapel, built by the Anglican visionary Nicholas Ferrar, who is buried in the shade of the façade, one understands why it was of such inspiration to Eliot. At the time we arrived, locals were preparing for Evensong, held every fifth Sunday of a month. There were no tourists. In fact, there were so few cars in the whole area that it reminded me of rural Ireland.

Why are there so few visitors to a region of charming villages, fine pubs, beautiful landscape and a rich historical legacy? Because it’s not near the sea; it seems that on weekends and holidays England tips towards the coast while those of us who love England’s interior can have it to ourselves. ‘We came from the sea, that’s why we go back to it again and again’, noted a friend.

‘All the more reason to go inland,’ say I.

A Great Briton

2009-09-04T07:28:00.000-07:00

Among all the refreshed memories of the outbreak of the Second World War, one name has been neglected: Alan Turing, the mathematical genius who cracked the German Enigma code, thereby shortening the war by an estimated two years, saving hundreds of thousands, perhaps millions of lives. Bletchley Park, the settlement of Nissan huts where Turing and his fellow codebreakers worked their magic, was recently denied government funding, an astonishing decision, considering the role it played in the preservation of civilised life. Simon Greenish, Director of the Bletchley Park Trust, recently revealed that school visits were to be cut due to lack of funding; this despite the Trust being awarded one of Ed Balls’ Quality Badges for the excellence of its education programmes.

Turing himself appears to be better known outside the UK; AppleMac’s famous logo of a bitten apple is an homage to Turing, who committed suicide by biting into poisoned fruit in 1954 after two years of ‘chemical castration’ imposed on him following a prosecution for gross indecency in 1952. Computer scientist John Graham-Cumming recently established a petition calling for an apology from the UK government for the way the mathematician was treated. He has also written to the Queen to ask for Turing to be awarded a posthumous knighthood. It seems the least a grateful nation can do.

There is of course another honour we can offer Turing. As referred to before, the fourth plinth of Trafalgar Square, currently plagued by exhibitionists filmed from the Sky Arts Nissan hut (some kind of oblique tribute to Bletchley Park?), will soon be free. So what’s it to be? A Spitfire or Alan Turing on the plinth? At the moment, I am inclining towards the latter. Arise Sir Alan, we are all in your debt.

Bletchley Park maintains an informative website and a vigorous social media campaign.

Tennyson Bicentenary

2009-08-06T06:50:00.000-07:00

Today marks the 200th anniversary of the birth of one of Britain’s greatest poets, Alfred Tennyson, author of many immortal phrases: ‘Theirs not to reason why/Theirs but to do and die – ‘Tis better to have loved and lost/than never to have loved at all’ to select but two.

We lamented late last year the almost complete absence of radio and TV programmes marking John Milton’s quartercentenary, bar the broadcast by BBC Radio 3 of Anton Lesser’s brilliant reading of Paradise Lost (actually, just a transmission of a recording by the budget CD label Naxos).

Tennyson, who ranks closely to Milton and who similarly shed light on the concerns of his time, in his case, the conceits and strangely morbid optimism of High Victorian society, has fared slightly better. Perhaps his work is considered more digestible.

Tonight, on Radio 3, Kit Wright considers the tender, lyrical Tears, Idle Tears, to be followed by similar analyses of Ulysses and The Kraken, by Vicki Feaver and Gwyneth Lewis respectively.

Tennyson’s Maud, poorly received on its release in 1855 has already received a terrific production on the same channel and his fellow Poet Laureate, Andrew Motion, is to champion Tennyson on Radio 4’s Great Lives. There are few better places to start than Tennyson if one wishes to understand the Victorian mentality. The poetry is pretty good too.

The works of Charles Dickens, a contemporary of Tennyson, also provide insights into the Victorian mentality. For further information, read our article Dickens and His Readers

Henry VIII: Man and Monarch

2009-08-03T09:49:00.000-07:00

Yesterday, I visited the British Library’s Henry VIII: Man and Monarch exhibition for the third time. Guest curated by David Starkey it is an uncompromising affair. Documents abound: final letters from Thomas More and Thomas Cromwell; Henry’s amendments to the endless theological debates concerning his divorce from Katherine of Aragon; Bibles, Books of Hours, love letters. There are tremendous portraits too, especially Holbein’s brilliant study of the manipulative, scheming and supremely smug courtier Richard Southwell, who appears to have had a hand in just about every prominent personal downfall of the time. There is an almost complete absence of gizmos and flashing lights, and it is all the better for that, though it is noticeable how few children have been there when I have visited. But if you want to know what proper historians really do, there is no better place. The exhibition has entered its final month and everyone interested in English history should go. Wednesdays and Thursdays have late-night openings.

More info here: www.bl.uk/henry

Criticising Right-Wing Historians

2009-07-31T06:23:00.000-07:00

As anyone who watches BBC Television’s Newsnight Review will know, the journalist Johann Hari has a tendency towards the excitable. This appears to be especially true when it comes to right-wing historians. Today, in his column in the Independent, Hari launches an attack on Andrew Roberts, whose new study of the Second World War, Storm of War, has garnered considerable acclaim (and a trite profile of the author in last week’s Observer). Roberts is capable of defending himself against the allegations made by Hari of consorting with apologists for apartheid and neo-fascists. But his assertion that Roberts, the author of some of the outstanding historical studies of recent years – Eminent Churchillians and Masters and Commanders will suffice - ‘would be shunned in a culture that takes human rights seriously’ is absurdly juvenile.

It reminds one of the spat that Hari had with another distinguished right-wing scholar, Niall Ferguson. Empire, Ferguson’s critical (often highly critical) defence of British imperialism broadcast by Channel 4 in 2003 was described by Hari as ‘a startlingly obscene TV series’ which means, presumably, that he would have liked it to be banned. Ludicrously, in his critique of Ferguson, Hari described the British Empire as a ‘psychopathic form of totalitarianism’ equal to that of Stalin’s Soviet Union. Quite where one goes when historical debate has descended to that level is hard to fathom. Ferguson proposed that Hari read some Solzhenitsyn.

I often disagree with both Roberts and Ferguson, as with almost all historians, regardless of their political views. But both are extraordinarily good scholars who make compelling arguments that demand to be taken seriously. To call Ferguson ‘an apologist for mass death’, as Hari did, is to reduce serious historical debate to that of the playground.

Andrew Roberts will be writing about the first use of Blitzkrieg in the September edition of History Today.

Meet Roberts and more of our most distinguished contributors on our Authors page.

Russian Historical Memory

2009-07-24T10:03:00.000-07:00

James Rodgers, the BBC’s former Moscow correspondent has an interesting article about the Russian state’s desire for a single historical truth. The idea is given short shrift, and quite rightly, by the distinguished historian of the Soviet Union, Robert Service. It anticipates a fascinating article by Catherine Merridale, to be published in the September edition of History Today, which examines Russia’s inability to come to terms with its troubled past.

Blunt in the News Again

2009-07-23T04:48:00.000-07:00

The release by the British Library of Anthony Blunt’s memoirs is a good time to return to Miranda Carter’s brilliant study of the art historian turned Soviet spy, Anthony Blunt: His Lives (Pan, 2002). Those who visited Manchester’s legendary nightclub, The Hacienda, will remember that it had a bar called The Gay Traitor over which hung a portrait of Blunt.

Bitter Spring

2009-07-22T04:38:00.000-07:00

The ever excellent Arts and Letters Daily is currently linking to a review of Stanislao Pugliese’s fascinating new biography of Ignazio Silone, Bitter Spring (Farrar, Strauss, Giroux). Silone was among that small group of principled progressive writers and activists, such as Orwell, Camus and Raymond Aron, who were appalled by the excesses of Soviet communism yet remained fervent opponents of injustice, racism and imperialism. He was, also like Orwell, a brilliant novelist. Among his finest works are Fontamara, a thrilling anti-Fascist tract distributed throughout Italy by US troops during the Second World War, and the arguably superior Bread and Wine, one of the great political novels of the 20th century.

On a similar theme, the death has been announced of another prominent writer, the Polish philosopher and historian Leszek Kolakowski, born in 1927. After a youthful embrace of communism, he became an unrelenting critic of totalitarianism. He once compared the idea of a reformed, democratic communism to ‘fired snowballs’. Such comments led him into a dispute with the British Marxist historian E. P. Thompson. In An Open Letter to Leszek Kolakowski, published in the 1973 edition of Socialist Register (edited, interestingly, by Ralph Miliband, father of the current Foreign Secretary and the Secretary of State for Energy and Climate Change), Thompson laid into Kolakowski for his abandonment of Marxism. Kolakowski’s reply is brilliant and, uncharacteristically, very funny. No ivory tower academic, Kolakowski played a crucial role in the Polish dissident movements of the 1970s that eventually became Solidarity.